


the golden hours

by virtueoso



Series: The Long Way Round [2]
Category: Figure Skating RPF
Genre: Domestic Fluff, F/M, Found Family, Future Fic, Light Angst
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-25
Updated: 2020-08-22
Packaged: 2021-03-05 22:20:15
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 35,617
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25512709
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/virtueoso/pseuds/virtueoso
Summary: She hadn’t allowed herself to imagine this, the kind of future where they get it all — but she does now.
Relationships: Scott Moir & Tessa Virtue, Scott Moir/Tessa Virtue
Series: The Long Way Round [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1827250
Comments: 75
Kudos: 129





	1. year one - part one

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This fic has been a long time coming. When I began planning for what I thought was going to be a quick follow-up to The Long Way Round back in January, I quickly realised that I loved this universe far too much to leave it at one chapter. A few weeks later, and I had an outline for a multi-chapter year by year exploration of Tessa and Scott’s life after opening up their own skating school. 
> 
> I’d like to stress that it’s NOT necessary to read The Long Way Round before this fic (although it is highly recommended if you’ve got some time to spare!). I’ve tried to make it so that there’s nothing too confusing for a new reader, but if there is anything that you’re unclear on, please let me know in the comments.
> 
> I hope you enjoy the first chapter of what’s been keeping me busy since the beginning of the year. This universe is my happy place. Hopefully it can bring you a little bit of the happiness it brings me.

For all her careful planning, life in the grander sense has never seemed to move in a straight line for Tessa.

She’s told the story a hundred times over to reporters and journalists, none of them ever quite convinced that she hadn’t engineered it all from the start. Her story sounds like a modern-day fairytale, she’ll freely admit that: two small-town kids who grew up with dreams of something bigger, who would strike out on their own at thirteen and fifteen and return the most decorated figure skaters of all time.

Five years old and taking her first nervous steps at the rink in a pair of blunt rental skates, she hadn’t entertained any dreams of Olympic victory. She hadn’t fantasised about a record-breaking sporting legacy or a name that meant anything beyond her family. At five years old, all she wanted was to please. 

Except then she met Scott, and everything sort of went out of the window.

She got high school, two years early. She got college, ten years late. And in-between, she had a career, a retirement, three serious relationships, a handful of pregnancy scares and five Olympic medals. 

Perhaps she should have taken the hint and adjusted her post-retirement plan to allow for a little more happy coincidence, because there are certain things that have happened in the ten years since the end of her athletic career that Tessa expected, and certain things that she certainly, absolutely, under any stretch of the imagination, did not.

She could have predicted her return to Canada, the only place that’s ever truly felt like home to her. 

She could even have predicted the newly opened skating school that seems to take up thirty-six hours of every day. 

No, the most unexpected aspect of her life right now is reserved for one man in particular. A man who, up until two years ago, she assumed wouldn’t have spoken to her if they were the last people on Earth. Her love for Scott Moir is eternally surprising and will continue to surprise her, she suspects, if the shit-eating grin on his face as he makes his way up the stands towards her is any indication. 

This is who she’s choosing to spend her days with. This man, who settles into the seat next to her, kicking his feet up onto the back of the seats in front like they’re sneaking time flirting at the back of class before the teacher notices. Tessa considers telling him off for getting the seats dirty, but it’s their rink, after all. 

Scott can just pay for the cleaning costs. 

“Evening,” he says, with a lazy grin. “Everything looking good from up here, captain? All shipshape?”

He’s been coaching with her at the boards for the past eight hours, knows precisely how the rink looks from the same seats they meet in every evening for their debrief of the day’s activities. She rolls her eyes.

“Only because I heard there was a pretty suspicious character hanging around earlier,” he continues, leaning back into his seat. “Totally distracting everyone from their work. Body of a Greek god, I’ve heard. Strikingly handsome. Great ass.” 

Tessa pays absolutely no attention to the suggestive waggle of his eyebrows. “You’ve heard, have you?” 

“Call it a manly intuition.” 

“I’d call it something pretty different,” Tessa says, which earns her an elbow in the ribs followed swiftly by a kiss to the side of her temple, Scott chuckling at the look on her face as she shrugs him off. 

She can play at being offended, but it’s hard to find much that gets to her these days. Despite the varied and dizzyingly numerous new sources of stress that came from the decision to run an entire skating school by themselves — a decision Tessa can now look back on and determine utterly foolhardy — she’s happier than she can remember being in a long time. 

The longest, maybe.

“How’re we feeling about tomorrow?” he says lightly.

“You remember how you used to tell me about the time your aunt put you in for a solo competition, and you got so nervous that you threw up your breakfast cereal all over the boys’ changing rooms? I’m not there yet, but I might be in eight hours’ time.” 

Scott gives a quick snort of laughter. “I’ll keep you away from the Captain Crunch, don’t worry,” he grins, clapping a hand across her knee. “It’s gonna be great, Tess. You’re gonna be great. Nothing to worry about. You, me, half a dozen crazy kids. Business as usual now, eh?” 

“I know that in _theory_ …” she says, a little less convinced than Scott that tomorrow’s schedule, the first full run-through of their teams’ new free dances is going to go off without a hitch.

“Nothing to it. We’re gonna go out there tomorrow morning, we'll have your morning coffee all ready to go, and I’m not gonna throw it all over you this time...” 

Despite herself, Tessa coughs a laugh. Her beautiful dove-grey puffer jacket (worn precisely once for coaching) still bears faded coffee stains splashed across the right cuff and down the breast, like a two year-old's first attempt at painting. 

“...Seriously, if you think I’m ever getting your Starbucks order without triple-checking the lid is on tight, you better think again. Crossed that bridge, suffered that near-death experience.” 

“It wasn’t _that_ bad, Scott.” 

Scott’s eyebrows shoot up, then pull together in a look that tells Tessa exactly how much he believes her. 

“It wasn’t,” she protests, her voice pitching up half an octave before she corrects it. “It wasn’t _.”_

“Tell that to my poor nerves. I take it upon myself to get your coffee every morning, and _I’m_ the one paying for it. Do you think I enjoy getting out of bed at six a.m. every morning just to make it to Starbucks for your flat white? Is my body made for hauling ass through the freezing snow? These hands are so delicate, Tessa. Practically untouched.” 

She rolls her eyes, ignoring the hand that he shoves in front of her face for inspection. “You’re such a drama queen. I don’t know how I ever got a minute in the spotlight with you.” 

“Bribery and underhand tactics,” Scott says, straight-faced. It’s only when Tessa tilts her head towards him with a half-serious “please go on but understand that your reply may determine where you sleep in the apartment tonight” glare that his expression splits into an grin. “Alright, not the bribery part.”

She raises her eyebrows. “Just the underhand part?” 

“That’s the part where you were so good it was unfair,” he clarifies. “The part where I ran around scared shitless just trying to keep up with you.”

“Scott, you know I spent ten years worrying that someone at Skate Canada was going to realise that you were far too talented to be partnered with me, and they were going to steal you away to skate in a fancy rink with a partner who was a hundred times better than I was?”

“Yeah, and you really could have saved yourself the bother,” he says, placing his hands behind his head and surveying her with a lazy grin. “They’d have to kidnap me to get me to leave you. Even then, they couldn’t get me to stay. I’d escape, find my way back to Detroit. Hell, I would have walked down the whole of the 401 in my skate guards.”

The thought of a nineteen year-old Scott clomping down the side of the highway in his red and white skate guards just to make it back to her at the Arctic Edge is more ridiculous than romantic, but she would be lying if she said it wasn’t a _little_ endearing. 

In any case, she blames it for the small bead of warmth that settles in her as she watches him watch her.

She’s never much liked being watched, silly as it might sound for someone who made a career out of a spectator sport. The eyes of a crowd always felt judgmental, whether she was on the ice or not — like everyone was waiting for her to make a mistake, ready to pounce on any sign of weakness. But she likes it when Scott looks at her. 

Scott’s eyes aren’t unkind or intrusive. He doesn’t look at her in the way so many others do, careful, calculating, working out what they can get from her, how much of her they can extract for their own purposes. When Scott looks at her, Tessa knows that he can see everything — the little things she hates about herself and the ones she tries to love, the other things that she loves only by looking through his eyes.

The thought might have made her nervous before, but she’s not afraid of it now. She’s spent her whole life trying to be understood, only to realise she already had someone who knew it all without saying a single word. 

So if her cheeks are a little pinker, her breathing a little shallower when she clears her throat quietly and sweeps her hair back behind her shoulder, she doesn’t try to explain away what she knows is a perfectly natural response to meeting the eyes of the man she loves. And when he leans towards her with that same lazy smile still on his face, his broad hand slipping up to cup the side of her face before he kisses her, he’s only doing what they’ve both wanted to do for the past eight hours. 

They’ll cut the silliness out in time for tomorrow. For now, they have a comfortably empty rink, and Scott’s mouth is doing a very nice thing that she would quite like to pay attention to.   
  


* * *

  
Back in the spring, when she and Scott had first started throwing around the idea of opening their own skating school, they probably should have known that the idea would take on a life of its own.

It began as an off-the-cuff discussion over a few large ( _generously_ large) glasses of wine and an evening spent commiserating how quiet the rink was with Natalie and Gabriel away in Toronto for their post-Olympic press tour. Within weeks, Scott was venturing out to grab groceries from the store and coming back with an appointment to scout potential venues in the neighborhood; Tessa found herself drafting press releases in her dreams. Their decision was all but made the moment the idea was floated, partly because it was one of the simplest decisions they’d ever had to make. 

The logic made perfect sense. Tessa knew she was staying in Canada, and she knew that she was going to continue to coach. She knew she wanted to keep working with Natalie and Gabriel, and that it would take an act of divine intervention to pull her and Scott away from one another now. She also knew, from various conversations with Scott over the course of the year, that as much as they both loved coaching at Gadbois, they were keen to have something of their own. And despite the chaos of the months that followed, sleepless night after sleepless night spent getting their school up and running in time for the beginning of the new season, she never once regretted their decision.

(Scott liked to tell her, usually at two in the morning when they were both on their twelfth coffee of the day, that they should give it all up and elope to a sunny village in southern Italy, but he usually passed out midway through the thought.)

Their hard work and a _little_ name-dropping secured them a venue: the Arena René-Masson, a modest but serviceable rink in the leafy suburb of Notre Dame, newly vacated by a junior hockey league team. It’s not much to look at, a squat concrete block housing a single ice pad, dance studio, and a gym on the lower level. Meals are taken in the stands or on one of the folding picnic tables squashed into the entrance hallway, and the coaches’ office is a flexible workspace operating out of the back of the gym next to the leaking water cooler, the penalty box by the boards, and in truly desperate times, the passenger seat of Scott’s truck. In the storage closet by the studio, they’ve still got the shabbily-painted figure of a hockey player that was previously bolted onto the flat roof of the entrance, neither of them quite sure what to do with it. Scott had made his case for a replacement statue of the two of them, mid-Carmen lift, but the motion hadn’t lasted long before Tessa, and then everyone else he suggested it to, shot him down.

To say the arena isn’t perfect would be putting it kindly.

If Gadbois was an eight-tier wedding cake with hand-frosted rose petals and royal icing pearls, the René-Masson is a slightly squashed, somewhat mouldy-looking iced bun that may have been sat on at some point. But it gets the job done, providing Tessa and Scott with enough space to do their jobs, and mostly importantly, enough space to take on a few more teams. Natalie and Gabriel had followed them across from Gadbois without a moment’s hesitation, leaving room in Tessa’s carefully planned schedule for three new pairs.

First were Maia Irving and Timothée Perrault, two junior high schoolers from Quebec, and the youngest of all the teams they had seen in try-outs. Tessa had barely been able to see them over the boards when they stepped onto the ice. Maia is a small, delicately-featured girl, with the kind of sleek brown hair that Tessa would have died to have at fourteen years old. Her partner Timothée is similarly built: matching chestnut-brown hair, slightly curled around his ears and the back of his neck; high, clean-cut cheekbones and a pinched, nervous look in his eyes. Taking on such a young team had been a concern — the pair are fresh up into juniors this year, coming off a silver medal at Novice Nationals the season prior — but Scott had taken a shine to them, and even Tessa had to admit that they had a certain entrancing quality to their skating, young as they were.

Their second team, Reece Byers and Nolan Levitsky, are well-established on the Canadian junior scene. Reece is a mature seventeen years old, wearing her long, slightly wild blonde hair pulled back into what Tessa has come to recognise as a signature fishtail braid. Nolan is younger, only sixteen and still growing into himself, with the goofy awkwardness of a boy who hasn’t yet grasped that he’s a couple of inches taller than he thinks he is. They’re an excellent match, equally bright and bold, and while they haven’t podiumed at Nationals, they’re well on their way there — if Tessa can keep Nolan from tripping over his own feet, skate bag, bench, and thin air long enough to get him on the ice.

Third to join were Niamh Taylor and her partner Joseph Reid. Niamh born in Ontario and Joseph in Glasgow, they compete for Great Britain, in their last year of juniors before Joseph’s age will necessitate a move up to seniors. Their partnership is a product of a summer school organised by the British skating federation a few years ago, and the pair have gone from strength to strength since, benefiting from the international exposure that comes with being a country’s top (and sole) competitive pair. They’re an exciting prospect; Niamh has extensive gymnastics training, and Scott already has the pair working on new lifts to implement into their programs over the next few seasons.

For a few short months, Niamh and Joe were the only non-Canadian pair in the school, until one day in late May — a typical May day in Montreal in every respect except what occurred in the rink, which could not be considered typical by any stretch of the imagination.  
  


* * *

  
The sun is high in the sky, the temperature sweltering, and the metal roof of the Arena René-Masson seems almost to shimmer and warp in the blistering heat. Inside, Tessa is sitting cross-legged in the dance studio, poring over stacks of paperwork to tab and file, her mind half on her work and half on the rhythm dance choreography she ran Maia and Tim through that morning. Despite stripping down to the bare essentials, a pale grey tank top and her usual black leggings, sweat is already dripping down her neck, beading where she’s pulled all the hair up off her neck and into a high bun. She can feel the moisture slipping down her back as she leans over the first set of papers — a set of registration forms for the upcoming Junior Grand Prix — and she grimaces, makes a mental note to email the building supervisors about fixing the air conditioning.

From downstairs, there’s a sudden clattering noise, but she pays it no mind; it’ll be Natalie and Gabriel arriving for their coaching slot, or Niamh and Joe returning from lunch. Both of the older pairs train during the day, leaving the morning and evening slots free for the school-age teams.

Except she passed Niamh and Joe on her way up to the studio fifteen minutes ago — and the heavy footsteps thumping along the corridor are _definitely_ not Natalie or Gabriel’s. The door rattles on its hinges, before being thrown open to reveal a heavily winded Scott.

His eyes are wide, his breathing heavy, but it takes Tessa less than a second to deduce excitement, not fear; the slight trembling of Scott’s hands as he turns and closes the door behind him is not nervousness but an over-abundance of energy, like a super-charged conductor.

"Scott?” she says. 

He runs his hands raggedly through his hair, tugging slightly on the ends. “Okay,” he says, with a half-dazed look in his eyes. “Okay, okay. Holy shit.” 

Tessa’s brow furrows. “What? What is it?” 

She racks her brains for a few seconds, trying to remember whether there was anything vitally important scheduled for today — was there a competition entry deadline they missed? An awards ceremony they forgot about? Another addition to the Moir clan? But nothing comes to mind (and she’s sure she would know if any of Scott’s family were expecting, because Scott would have talked her ear off about it already.) 

“Fuck, Tess, you’ll be glad you’re sitting down already,” he mutters, and glances quickly at the clock. “How long have we got? A few minutes, yeah? Okay. Alright.” 

He crosses the room to settle down opposite her on the floor, looks at her for a long moment before: “The Russians,” he says, with great importance.

Tessa gives him a blank look. “...Specifically?” 

“Silvestrova and Andreyev. They want to train with us. Asked for a try-out as soon as we’ll have them. I just got off the phone with Ilya.” 

Tessa’s heart swoops in her chest like it’s about to take flight straight out of her ribcage, and _oh_. 

Okay. 

_Those_ Russians. 

Ekaterina Silvestrova and Ilya Andreyev, the talk of the town in their home country and across the globe, predicted to usher in a new era of Russian ice dance dominance. They’re all but national superstars, the poster children of a dozen sponsorships with barely two senior seasons behind them — and they’re very clearly positioned to be Olympic contenders in four years’ time, which puts them in direct competition with Natalie and Gabriel, looking to defend their Olympic gold. 

“Silvestrova and Andreyev,” Tessa repeats slowly. “As in, Junior World Champions, Silvestrova and Andreyev. Scott, _those_ Russians?”

“I know,” he says hoarsely. “I couldn’t even believe the call at first, had to ring Patch and make sure I had the right number and it wasn’t some hoax.”

“Silvestrova and Andreyev want to train with us,” she says again, trying to make the words connect with meaning in her brain, and Scott nods.

Her head spins with a hundred and one questions. 

Ekaterina and Ilya’s victory at the Junior World Championships was crushing, a ten-point margin over their closest competitors; granted, they’ve struggled on the senior circuit since, coasting to some extent on the word of mouth behind them, but what team doesn’t have growing pains? Moving to Montreal seems an extreme answer to their problems.

How would she and Scott take on another team this late in the season? Would there be space for them in the schedule? Would they get on with Natalie and Gabriel? Most importantly, why are they willing to risk the career they’ve built thus far to start over in an entirely new country with coaches they’ve never even met, let alone worked with before?

“There’s barely a few months left until the start of the season,” she manages to get out, struggling to focus against a mind that pulls her in fifty directions at once. “They can’t possibly want to come now. They’d need to get visas, find accommodation… surely they’ll want to wait a year?”

Scott only shakes his head. “It has to be now. From the way they were talking on the phone, they’re not happy, and I think they’ve realised there’s not a lot of time left to change things. They don’t wanna leave it until it’s too late. Sure, maybe they sacrifice this season, but in the long run they’re in the right place, with the right coaches, preparing for the Olympics in the right way.”

“But it’s not just one season they might be sacrificing, it could be the whole quadrennial, I mean — there’s no telling what a change of this magnitude could do to their career. They’re leaving _Russia_ , it’s not like a quick waltz down the road from Canada to Detroit. The blowback from the federation alone...” 

“I had the exact same thoughts, Tess, believe me.”

Tessa takes a deep breath, focusing herself. 

Scott spoke with both of them on the phone, so their English should be good enough that communication wouldn’t be too much of an issue. If they’re calling Canadian coaches, they’ve obviously considered all the options in their own country and ruled them out, for one reason or another. They’re desperate; they must be, or else they would never consider upending their entire lives, leaving their families and friends behind to train halfway across the globe. And for some reason, they trust her and Scott with the future of a nation’s Olympic hopes. With _their_ future.

It’s a responsibility that she will never take lightly, not for any one of their teams.

She shakes her head, gives a helpless little shrug. “I don’t know. It’ll be so hard for them. They’ll have to put so much at risk. We will too.”

“They’re not afraid of it.”

“Well, I’m afraid _for_ them.”

“Don’t be. They’d be no worse off here than they are in their current situation, I can guarantee you. They were real upset on the phone, T…” 

He falters for a moment, goes quiet.

“I think they just want to feel like they have a choice. From the sound of things, they’ve had no control for a while now — coaches deciding things for them, handing them programs with no input. Sure, they don’t know us. They have no idea whether we’d be the right fit for them. But name recognition goes a long way, and then winning Calgary with Nat and Gabriel… it’s enough for them to take the chance.”

Scott’s decision has been made already; Tessa knows just by looking at him, the kind of wistful, half-hopeful look in his eyes that gives him away quicker than anything he could say. 

He would never try to influence her one way or the other, and their decisions have to be unanimous, but she knows which side of the line he’s going to fall. She chews on her lip, thinking things over.

“I don’t blame them for wanting control over their career,” she says, hesitantly. “But a whole new country, no friends and family…”

“We managed in Michigan,” Scott says, but it’s half-hearted, and she knows that he knows it’s not the same. “Look, if you’re really not sure about it, I can tell them no. But I’m just gonna say, for the record, that I think this could be something really special. Letting them come for one try-out can’t hurt. We’ll talk to Nat and Gabriel too, make sure they’re happy before we do anything. I just think…” 

He reaches up to scratch the back of his neck, sighing. “I dunno. Maybe I’m getting sentimental.”

Logic tells her that everything about this decision would be a terrible idea. Doubt has her dreaming up a hundred worst-case scenarios where Natalie and Gabriel are so betrayed by the notion of their direct competition coming for a try-out that they leave the school and return to Gadbois. Fear says that the political ramifications of Ekaterina and Ilya’s defection from their home country could be career-ending, not even considering the ripple effect on the other teams in the school.

But curiosity has Tessa wondering what it would be like to work with a Russian team for the first time, let alone one of Ekaterina and Ilya’s calibre. Curiosity has her imagining the kind of programs they could dream up together, fierce and startling.

And in the back of her head, there’s the same voice that she suspects rings loud and clear in Scott’s head too. How could they turn down a team who, for all intents and purposes, seem to want only what she and Scott wanted all those years ago when they left Detroit: a chance at controlling their own story?

“Okay,” she sighs, with a small nod. “One try-out. We take things from there.”  
  


* * *

  
Four weeks later, the Russians leave the Arena René-Masson with an open invitation to join the school on a permanent basis, and Tessa can’t honestly say she expected any other outcome. 

She could blame it on Scott’s persistence, like a dog with a bone, always ready with a frustratingly reasonable answer to any question she threw at him about logistics and scheduling and training. She could blame her lack of impartiality, the little irrational part of her brain that didn’t care at all for logic or rationality, that thought only of how she had felt at the crossroads of her own career, convinced that it was Marie-France and Patrice or it was an early retirement.

The truth of the matter is, her mind was made up as soon as she saw the two of them skate.

She had watched program after program in preparation for their arrival, studying video footage of old competitions until her eyes turned glassy and Scott had to nudge her up to bed before she fell asleep on the couch. Her research had confirmed what she remembered from the few clips that had come her way at the time; Ekaterina and Ilya’s junior years were extraordinary. She had never seen anything like it: their technical competency matched by an emotional commitment rare for their age; complex, fast-paced choreography that never became frantic. No movement was without meaning. They weren’t re-telling a story handed to them by a choreographer; they were creating it, right there and then, new with every performance.

But as the years dragged on and their senior career began, she watched their passion disappear behind identical frigid smiles, watched the weight of expectation and routine push them to a disappointing fifth place at Russian Nationals, and understood the same thing that Marie-France and Patrice had told her when she asked their opinion: a beautiful couple with abundant potential, but what a shame they seemed to have lost their love for the sport.

In advance of the try-out, she prepares herself for that, for a pair who might be hesitant and slow, a pair who need reminding why they started skating, long before the pressures of Olympic gold or national fame. 

They make a funny pair in person, not a natural fit at first glance, Ilya tall and slim-shouldered with floppy brown hair that gives him a puppyish look, at odds with Ekaterina’s angular features. Initially, Tessa wonders how they were ever partnered together, these physical opposites — and then she sees them on the ice.

Three times in her life, she let instinct overrule her brain. The first — arms outstretched to the sky, blades placed evenly against Scott’s thighs, the roar of the crowd thundering in her ears, her pulse, through every fibre of her muscle — she knew they were going to win their final Olympic gold medal. 

The second, she decided that despite the burned bridges and the mistakes of the past, the things she wished she’d never said and the things she wished she had, the frail, tenuous trust that existed between them, that life with Scott was, _is_ , worth a leap of faith.

The third, she watches Katia and Ilya skate, and knows that she’ll offer them a place in the school without a second thought.

The sit-down interview comes later, the practice technical drill and choreography session, ensuring their motivation for switching coaches is genuine and they can take direction well enough. But Tessa knows that no matter what their federation will say, no matter the extra hours of work she and Scott will have to put in to get the pair competition-ready in time for autumn, no matter the logistical nightmare of bringing them across to Canada, they belong here, with her and Scott.

She sees the fear in both of them, curling like a riptide, watches them use it as fuel to the fire to push harder, to skate faster, to love fiercer. She remembers as well as they do the feeling of cruel inevitability, to have nobody at your back but your partner. She remembers what it’s like to hope in the most hopeless of times: the courage it takes to dream for something of your own, and the desperation. She watches them on the ice, edges deep and sure, melting through the ice like it’s nothing, twin flames that burn all the brighter together.

Scott catches her eye when the music has faded and the pair are breathing heavily at centre ice, leaning against one another where they’ve finished in their improvised ending position, and Tessa nods slowly.

All the logic in the world couldn’t have convinced her to turn them down after that.  
  


* * *

  
So she and Scott have their school — The Notre Dame International Skating School — shoe-string budget, dysfunctional family of twelve, perilous lack of sleep and all. And Tessa wouldn’t trade it for the world. 

\----

“Let’s go with the arms too, guys, start putting the arms in there. Nice loose arms, floaty arms,” Scott says, turning his head over his shoulder to watch Maia and Tim as he demonstrates. “Careful with your balance, make sure you’re keeping your core muscles engaged. Those arms can be as big as you want them — come on, you can go bigger than that! _Big_ arms, Maia, like you’re trying to reach Tim.”

There’s a quiet thump as Maia’s ‘big arms’ make contact with her partner’s torso.

“ _Ow_ ,” complains Tim, and Maia giggles. “Maia, stop it, come on — stop, that hurts! Stop!”

\----

It’s eleven a.m. on Sunday morning, and Tessa is just settling in to enjoy her only day off in her favoured style: sitting cross-legged on the sofa with her coffee brewing in the kitchen and a bag of freshly-bought pastries on the table in front of her, an old rerun of Love It or List It all ready to go on the TV, when her mobile phone rings.

“Tessa? Hello? Hi, sorry, this is Amanda, Nolan’s mum?”

Scott chooses this moment to round the corner from the kitchen, two mugs of coffee dangling from both hands, mumbling something that Tessa can’t make out around the half-eaten pastry stuffed into his mouth. 

“Hi Amanda,” Tessa says, cradling the phone to her ear as she shifts along the sofa to make room for Scott. “How’re you? Is everything all right?”

“Well, no, not exactly…”

“Ah, _crap_ —” Scott’s pastry, already hanging by a thread as he leant forwards to deposit the coffee mugs on the table in front of the sofa, has fallen off and scattered across the floor.

“Excuse me?” Amanda says.

Tessa shoots Scott a glare. “No, no, it’s nothing, sorry. I have the TV on. Please go on. You were saying…?”

Scott looks suitably admonished as he plucks the surviving portion of pastry up off the floor and dusts it off, mouthing “five second rule” to Tessa, before he trots off into the kitchen to grab a dustpan and brush.

“Well, it’s Nolan,” Amanda says.

“Who is it?” Scott hisses, poking his head out from around the kitchen doorway. 

Tessa mutes her microphone. “Nolan’s definitely broken something.”

“What?!”

On the phone, Amanda continues. “He was out playing football yesterday, and you know what he’s like, you can tell him until you’re blue in the face that he needs to be careful but… anyway, he took a bad fall, injured his ankle. We made sure he rested it, but it was still badly swollen this morning so we took him to get it X-rayed, and he’s definitely sprained his ankle.”

“Correction,” Tessa calls. “Sprained ankle.”

She hears Scott groan. “For _fuck’s_ sake… six weeks until their JGP…”

With reluctance, Tessa leans forward to switch off the television, instead rummaging underneath the sofa to pull out her laptop and navigate to her calendar. The calendar is colour coded for each of their teams; Reece and Nolan are a bright yellow, their training sessions, competitions, off-ice schedules and other commitments marked out in exacting detail for the upcoming season. It’s a beautiful, neat schedule, and one that Tessa spent many hours putting together for them. Many _more_ hours she and Scott will now spend re-arranging in light of Nolan’s injury.

Tessa takes a breath, holds it, and then slowly exhales, letting the brief spike of frustration pass through her. So much for their day off.

She unmutes her microphone.

“Okay, Amanda? Thank you so much for letting me know, you did exactly the right thing getting the ankle checked out. Here’s what we’re going to do—”

\----

There’s the time Joe turns up three hours late for practice, because his car tire blew on the way across to the rink, and he had no battery left on his phone to contact anyone, and Tessa and Scott spend the entire morning talking Niamh down from calling the police. 

Then, when Joe finally shows up, they have to talk her down from committing a felony. 

That’s a fun morning. 

\----

“It’s simple, Katia, you see—”

“No, I don’t see.”

“—you tie this around my eyes, and then I will stand here, and you should tell me where to go to avoid all these little things on the floor, and the fastest one to get to the end wins. It is like a race, yes?”

“I still am not seeing the point.”

“To win! To be the fastest.”

“I know we are the fastest already. This silly thing makes no difference.” 

“Because it’s fun? No, Katia, wait—please—I will die if I hit this thing, Scott said so. I will be out, and we will be last in the game. Please. I need you to help. We will die if I hit something.” 

Katia levels her partner with an unflinching gaze. “Die, then.” 

\----

“Sloppy edge, Nat,” Tessa calls from across the rink. “Do it again.” 

Natalie folds in half at the waist, bending down to place all her weight against her knees, breathing heavily through her mouth. “Oh my god, please—” 

Natalie and Gabriel are drilling one-foot step sequences, a trial by fire to launch them back into competitive training. Their return to training is later than usual as a result of the post-Olympic press tour, wanting to capitalise on the brief profile boost following an Olympic win — not that this cuts them any slack when they finally get back in the rink. This is the sixth time they’ve run through the step sequence, and the sixth time Tessa has told them to do it again. Even Scott, standing at the side of the rink with his arms folded, has a sympathetic look in his eyes. 

Unfortunately for the pair, it’s not Scott who is running the training session. 

“Once more, come on,” Tessa says, hands on her hips. “One last push, I promise, and then you’ll get a break.” 

Grimacing, Gabriel reaches over to give his partner a pat on the back in passing. “Come on, Nat. Easier to get it over with.” 

“‘Easy’ is not a word I would use,” Natalie says breathlessly, as she reluctantly straightens up and follows Gabriel over to the end of the rink. “Pretty sure easy means your lungs aren’t on fire and your legs don’t feel like jelly. I swear, I don’t think I’ve felt this out of shape since—” 

“If you’ve got breath to talk, you’ve got breath to train,” Tessa calls. “Ready? Position — and one, two, three, four—” 

\----

Alright, ninety-eight percent of the time Tessa wouldn’t trade it for the world. The other two percent, she’s thinking about how much less work it would have been to just adopt a litter of excitable puppies and call it a day.  
  


* * *

  
It speaks to the breakneck pace of their schedule that the first proper day she and Scott take off from the school is in late July, in order to attend Scott’s niece’s kindergarten graduation. The event is something he’s been talking about for a couple of months now, and Tessa has been looking for a reason to reunite with the Moirs for a while, as much as the idea terrifies her.

She hasn’t seen Scott’s family in six years. The events that transpired in the years following retirement took their toll on everyone; the only communication Tessa has had with Alma since then is a handful of phone calls on important occasions and a birthday card every year, signed with the same little smiley face that Alma used to draw on Tessa’s skating certificates. She doesn’t doubt that Alma still cares for her, but she can’t help but feel uneasy the closer it gets to the day she and Scott will be driving down to Ilderton.

There’s a part of her that desperately wants to make a good impression on his family (re-impression, reintroduction, reunion, whatever you want to call it), wants it so badly that it hurts.

She’s tried, over the years, to stop worrying about what other people think of her, to stop second-guessing herself, doubting her own instincts. But this is Scott’s family; a good number of them have known her since she was seven years old and could barely see over the boards at the Ilderton Arena. She wants them to like her now just as much as she did then. So, in the tried and tested manner — like it’s her very first try-out with the boy at the rink that everyone talks about, the instructor’s kid with the buzzed hair and the troublemaking streak a mile wide — she puts on her best dress, does her hair up nicely, and sticks on a brave face. 

(Tessa is unsure what the dress code is for a kindergarten graduation ceremony, much less a kindergarten graduation moonlighting as her official reintroduction to the family.

“It’s no big deal,” Scott had said, coming up behind her and squeezing the tops of her shoulders as she sat half-dressed in front of her dresser, fretting over her mismatched eyeliner. “You don’t need to worry about that stuff, honestly. My mom wouldn’t care if you turned up wearing sweatpants and one of my gross old workout tops. Everyone loves you whatever way.”

She’d re-done her eyeliner for the third time, not wishing to put that theory to the test.)

The graduation ceremony takes place in the morning while she and Scott travel down from Montreal, planning to arrive at Danny’s place in time for the afterparty. It’s due to be a relatively small affair for the Moir clan, meaning there will only be a few dozen people in attendance: Alma and Joe, Charlie, Danny and their families (including star of the hour, newly graduated Alyssa), and a handful of assorted cousins and relatives that Alyssa gets on well with.

By the time they arrive, it’s well into the afternoon, and the nerves buzzing under Tessa’s skin aren’t so much butterflies in her stomach as they are huge great angry hornets. The sun hangs low in an overcast sky, and Tessa can hear the sound of the party from inside as she and Scott pull up to the crowded driveway, exiting the car and stepping into the sticky heat of the afternoon. The tell-tale shrieking of young kids drowns out the chirping of cicadas from the bushes, a warm buzz of music and laughter spilling from the open living room windows.

Tessa sucks in a breath, flattening her palm across her stomach.

The house seems to grow larger and larger the longer she stares at it, gaping white windows looming up out of the afternoon haze, and she finds her breath coming a little quicker, her knuckles tightening against the fabric of her dress. It’s nonsense; she’s known these people almost as long as she’s known Scott, has loved them like her own flesh and blood. There’s nothing to be afraid of.

But as Scott finishes heaving the wine cooler out of the back of the car and comes to join her, his shoes crunching on the gravel, there’s a frown on his face that tells her exactly how well she’s coping with the current situation.

“Hey, you okay?” he says, reaching out to touch a hand to her hip. “You look like me right before the Captain Crunch incident.”

“Fine.”

Her response is automatic, and his frown deepens.

“I’m fine, Scott. Really. It’s not a big deal, it’s just nerves. Everyone’s waiting on us, we should go—”

Slowly, he lowers the wine cooler to the ground. “Hey, I don’t care if everyone’s waiting on us, I care whether you’re okay or not. Listen, if you’re not feeling it then we can turn around right now. I don’t need you to put yourself through hell for my sake. I asked you to be here, and maybe that’s my bad, but—”

“No, I want to be here.”

“Tess. C’mon. Look me in the eyes and tell me you’re sure.”

Sometimes, she _really_ hates that he knows her as well as he does. Anyone else would take her words at face value, but Scott knows that she has a habit of telling people whatever makes them happy in order to avoid confrontation. It took him a good five or six years to work that one out, and he’s used it to frustratingly good effect ever since.

With a sigh, she turns her face up towards him, lets him see whatever he wants. 

“I’m sure,” she tells him, jaw set in resolution, and she is. 

She’s terrified as hell, that much is clear to both of them, but there’s a reason she’s been pushing for this for months, and it’s the same reason she took three hours to get ready, the same reason she spent the entire car ride over interrogating him about the minutiae of his most distant relatives’ lives.

She wants to be part of Scott’s life again, wants him to be part of hers, family and all.

Scott scrutinises her with a half-narrowed look, the line between his brows creasing then unfurling again as he nods.

“Alright,” he says, his thumb rubbing gently across her hip. “I trust you. Now, c’mere.”

“Scott…”

“Gotta make it quick,” he says, opening his arms wide. “I reckon we’ve got… oh, thirty seconds before the kids send out a search party? Take it or leave it, Virtch.”

She stands there staring at him, a stern look on her face, and Scott stares back at her with the exact same expression of stubborn determination, arms held open. He wiggles his fingers.

“I think it’s unnecessary,” she says, but her tone of voice is more relieved than resigned as she steps into Scott’s familiar embrace and feels his arms close around her.

“Nothing unnecessary about taking care of yourself,” Scott says. 

In the closeness of their bodies, Tessa can feel the sound of his voice vibrating against her, comfortable and warm, lets herself sink into that.

His arms tighten around her, and he leans his cheek against her hair. “Or letting someone else take care of you.

They’re still working on this, the whole ‘vulnerability’ thing. 

A lifetime as a competitive athlete hardly endeared her to the prospect of asking for help when she needs it. For most of her life, success was measured by how much bitterness she could swallow: long, hard days in freezing cold rinks, burning legs and numb fingertips, falling into bed exhausted only to wake and do it all over again. She has a partner who, more often than not, knows exactly what she needs without her having to verbalise anything at all, but they’re still trying to work towards a point where he doesn’t have to. Where she can ask him for things without feeling like she’s admitting failure, like there’s a weakness within her.

They’re not quite there yet, but as they stand together in the quiet light of the afternoon, Scott’s arms pressed securely around her, his heartbeat at her cheek, hands at her back, she doesn’t feel weak at all. 

The nerves buzzing under her skin quieten and settle — still there, present in her heightened alertness, the awareness of every single place where his skin touches hers, but enough for her to deal with.

“Alright,” she mumbles, with a quiet sigh, slipping her arms up to loop around his neck. “I’ll give you this one.”

His laughter rumbles against her, through her. His hands have splayed across her back to hold her the way he knows she likes: broad hands and wide, familiar touch, so she can feel him like he’s everywhere at once, his cupped palms holding her together, the path back home strung between his fingertips.

She loves him for all that he does for her, day after day, for all that he is, familiar and safe and generous and passionate and unashamed; strong when she needs him to be, and stronger still to admit to her when he isn’t. Sometimes the force of her love seems enough to overwhelm her, like if she stopped to consider it for longer than a second, she would find herself struck speechless. 

Words abandon her when she tries to explain any of it — so she turns her head to press the smallest of kisses to his skin instead, hopes that he’ll find in that all the things that she finds in him.

“Come on, then,” she says, stepping back, cheeks slightly pink and her eyes skipping across his face. “Or they’ll have started the family feud before we even get there.”

Scott slips his hand into hers and gives it a brief squeeze. “Without me?” he grins, picking up the wine cooler in his other hand. “Impossible.”

She’s still smiling by the time the front door opens, Charlie’s wife greeting them both with a hug and guiding them into the hallway to take off their shoes and deposit their jackets on an overcrowded rack. Scott disappears into the kitchen with the wine cooler, leaving Tessa to follow the noise of the party around the hallway and into the living room, where she is abruptly faced with a room full of people.

Every single conversation comes to a dead halt. 

God, she _really_ hopes Scott remembered to tell his family that she was coming.

Biting back the urge to shrink into the hallway and out of the front door, she looks over the assorted company of Moirs. There’s Joe sitting in the armchair by the television, the crows feet by his eyes as deep and sincere as they ever were; Danny on the sofa, wrestling with a small child; Charlie poking his head curiously around the doorway on the opposite side of the room.

There are faces she doesn’t recognise too, young children clustered around a game at the corner of the room, a few older ones that she guesses must be cousins. None of them seem to recognise her, staring up with brief curiosity at the newcomer to their gathering, but they don’t stop looking at her either, and Tessa feels suddenly like she’s got it all wrong: she’s put on too much makeup, she should have tied her hair up, her dress isn’t nice enough for a family gathering and is she _sure_ she got that coffee stain out of the skirt?

Then, Danny loses his grip on his daughter. 

“Tessa!” cries Alyssa, Danny’s six year-old daughter — a girl whom Tessa has never met before in her life, but has the sudden pleasure of knowing very closely as the kid barrels into her at top speed.

“Tess, hey! You made it!” Danny cheers, evidently abandoning parental responsibility at the first opportunity. 

Charlie pipes up from around the door. “Tessa? Tessa’s here? Oh shoot, someone go tell Mom. _Mom! Ma?! Tessa’s here!”_

The small child wrapped around Tessa’s legs giggles, more heads turning in Tessa’s direction as the swell of noise grows louder and louder, the news of her arrival rippling through the household — and okay, she had _definitely_ forgotten how overwhelming Scott’s family can be at the best of times.

“Wow, um, hi—” she says, trying to mask her wince as Alyssa squeezes tighter. “Okay, I don’t know about—”

“I have to wonder, is it a genetic trait that makes this family lose all sense of control when it comes to you, Tessa, love?”

Tessa’s head snaps around to find the source of the new voice immediately, because _that_ voice is wonderfully and blissfully familiar, full of the scratchy, warm tones of her childhood — and sure enough, it’s Alma who stands in the doorway, her arms folded across her chest as she surveys her present company with a stern look.

“For heaven’s sake, leave the poor girl alone for a minute, will you _please_. Alyssa, we let our guests take a seat before we harass them in this household.” She shoots Danny a look. “Perhaps your father could do with that reminder too.”

“Ma—” Danny protests, but he’s quickly silenced by Alyssa flinging herself back on top of him. 

“Now then,” Alma says, turning her attention to the slightly shell-shocked Tessa. She takes hold of Tessa’s arms, looking her up and down. “Let me have a look at you.”

In the back of her brain, Tessa recognises dimly that she should be self-conscious; she should be terrified, pulse pounding so hard that her heart feels fit to burst out of her chest. The thought of standing in front of Alma, looking into the older woman’s eyes, was a prospect that made her sick with nerves only a few hours ago, but here in the moment she can’t begin to fathom why.

The feel of Alma’s hand over hers is a little rougher, the skin thin and papery, and the dark chestnut of Alma’s dyed hair gives way more easily to proud silvers. But the look in her eyes is precisely as Tessa remembers — and how could it not be? She sees the same eyes in the face of the man she loves, every morning and every night.

“Alma—” she says, barely knowing where to begin, least of all with the entirety of Scott’s family as their captive audience.

It’s hopeless, really, to try to put any of it into words. She wants to say how grateful she is to Scott’s mother for bringing them back together again, refusing to allow them to sit around and fester in ruined silence. She could go on for hours, endless apologies for all that happened to divide them in the first place, how much she has missed and been missed, in this family that welcomes her back into the fold like she never left. _Her_ family too, she realises, as she glances behind Alma’s head to see a familiar photo half-hidden amongst the clutter of photo frames and ornaments on the mantelpiece in the hallway: a photo of her and Scott, seven and nine and as fresh-faced and pink-cheeked as all the surrounding childhood photos of Danny and Charlie and Scott.

Her family every bit.

There’s so much she wants to say, but she realises with surprise that she couldn’t even if she knew the words to use, because her throat is thick and heavy, and her eyes fill with tears that she blinks back furiously.

“Alma, I—”

“It’s alright, sweetheart,” Alma says, drawing her into a tight hug. “There’s no need to explain anything to me.”

She gratefully takes the opportunity to press her face into Alma’s shoulder and hide her teary eyes from view.

“I’m sorry I didn’t come sooner,” she says, muffled against Alma’s embrace.

“Nonsense,” Alma says, with a patient fondness in her voice. “There’ll be no apologising.”

“But—”

“No need at all,” she says, with an air of finality, and Tessa draws back from the hug to watch a gentle smile spread across Alma’s face — familiar as ever, the way it crinkles up at the corners of her eyes, sets all the proud lines of her face aglow. She brushes a thumb at the corner of Tessa’s eyes, wiping away the wet trail of a tear. “There we go. Can’t have your lovely makeup getting messed up.”

“Ma?”

It’s Scott, his voice drifting into earshot as he pops his head around the corner of the door and steps into the room. His eyes go instantly to Tessa, noting her suspiciously watery eyes and Alma’s reassuring posture, hand rubbing across Tessa’s back and shoulders.

Scott rounds on his brothers in a heartbeat. “I bring Tess back for all of _three minutes_ and she’s already _crying_?”

The room erupts into a cacophony of noise: Danny and Charlie vehemently defending themselves, Alyssa overjoyed to see her favourite uncle, Alma trying valiantly to keep the peace and stop her sons from knocking each other out. It’s all Tessa can do to stand there and laugh.

Scott’s family is a chaos all of their own, and she’d forgotten exactly how much she missed it.  
  


* * *

  
Throughout the course of the afternoon, it quickly becomes clear that Alyssa, a Moir through and through, is utterly fixated on Tessa.

If she’s not trailing after Tessa down the hallway, rambling on about the stuffed toy pony that her Daddy got her for graduation, she’s squeezing her way onto Tessa’s lap on the sofa, reaching up with wide eyes and pleading to braid Tessa’s hair, or dragging Tessa by the hand to her playroom to show off where she practices ballet in front of a mirror mostly covered in colourful princess stickers.

It comes as a pleasant surprise to Tessa, who has been trying to convince most of her friends and family for a while now that it’s not that she doesn’t like children. She likes them just fine, especially the chubby little babies that look like marshmallow men, and the butter-wouldn’t-melt, rosy cheeked pre-schoolers who inadvertently learn how to swear.

Children have never liked _her_.

It’s why Scott always got the babies to hold, and she got the autograph pen. Parents had a sixth sense, knew just from looking at her dangly earrings and pendant necklaces that she was not a baby-friendly zone. Outside of the narrow circle of friends whose kids she sometimes comes across when visiting, Tessa hasn’t voluntarily interacted with anyone under the age of fourteen in a very long time — which makes it all the more surprising when Alyssa not only ropes Tessa into a game of Tag in the backyard, but actually seems to enjoy Tessa’s participation.

Scott pulls monster duty, stomping across the yard with his arms raised in front of him. Tessa doesn’t have to do too much more than act as a human shield for the tiny Alyssa, and after an extended period of monster fighting with imaginary swords, verify Scott’s death as he lies prone on the grass, limbs splayed and his tongue stuck out.

“ _You_ check, Tessa,” Alyssa insists, poking her head out from behind Tessa’s legs to peer over at Scott’s unmoving body. Her crown of curly brown hair is puffed out and wild, her eyes wide, making her small face look even smaller. “He’s scary. I don’t like him.”

“Alright,” Tessa says, brushing her fingers quickly through Alyssa’s hair as the little girl looks up at her. 

It’s hard not to fall in love with the kid, those big brown Moir eyes and the over-emotional, sweet-natured disposition. Earlier, when she thought Tessa had gone home without saying goodbye, she was utterly inconsolable, crying so hard that the whole household came rushing into the hallway to see what was the matter before Tessa reappeared from the bathroom she’d been reapplying her lipstick in. 

“Tell you what, why don’t you stay here and keep watch? It’s a very important job. If you see anything move, you just yell and we can escape. Got it?”

Alyssa nods, her chin setting in resolution. “Got it.”

“Good girl. Keep those eyes peeled.”

It only takes Tessa a few steps to close the distance to Scott’s prone form. He really has tried very hard; his limbs are all stuck out at right angles, unnatural shapes against the soft grass, and her own body protests in sympathy with him. The position must be hell to hold. Doubtless he’ll tell her all about it tomorrow morning, when she’ll have to help winch him up out of bed.

“See, the first thing you want to do is check for breathing,” Tessa calls, as she knees down on the grass by Scott’s body and holds her hand out over his nose. 

His breathing is slow and steady, huffing out in gentle puffs of warm air against her hand, but there’s a faint tremor to it — silent laughter?

“No breathing,” she announces. “I think we got him good, but just to double check—”

She leans down across Scott’s body, placing her ear to his chest. Sure enough, she can hear the soft sound of his breathing, his chest pushing out steadily against her. And the asshole, he’s _definitely_ laughing, the shaking of his body unmistakable when she’s pressed against him.

“Yep, and this one too!” she calls. “Looks like he was no match for us—”

With a grumbling roar, Scott bursts to life again. Alyssa squeals, bolting for her playhouse at the bottom of the garden, but Alyssa is decidedly _not_ the target of Scott’s hunt this time.

Later, the rather interesting stories Alyssa tells over dinner about her time out in the yard playing monsters with Uncle Scott and Aunt Tessa always seem to end with the monster eating Tessa’s face off, and there are more than a few knowingly raised eyebrows cast their way.

Their relationship has been plain knowledge amongst Scott’s family for a while now. The implications of Tessa’s move back to Montreal were clear enough, and really, it’s never been _news_ to Scott’s family that their son has maintained an ongoing, invariably complicated relationship with Tessa since he was old enough to realise that he loved her. 

But there must be something different about this time, because when Scott mentions that they’ve finally found a house and they’ll be moving come August, Alma rapidly takes to quizzing Scott on the proximity of their new place to the rink, the shops, and the local daycare facilities in quick succession.

“Ma!” Scott exclaims, his face going beet red.

They get the usual good-natured teasing about how they owe Alma a mention in the wedding speech for partnering them together in the first place, and Danny insists that he deserves a plug for his behind-the-scenes plotting with Jordan. But for the most part, people are happy to offer them the rare luxury of privacy.

She and Scott get no interruptions when they’re sitting on the sofa watching television together, Tessa too exhausted from the day’s events to care whether they’re being gross when she slips her legs into Scott’s lap and leans her head against his chest. They don’t get called into the kitchen to help wash up, or hauled up to the guest bedrooms to help Danny and his wife prepare rooms. 

So, when they both pass out on the sofa at nine o’clock, neither Danny nor Charlie feel too bad about slipping silently into the room to take a few photos of the two of them curled up with each other.

The inevitable wedding slideshow needs plenty of material, after all.  
  


* * *

  
The fact of the matter is that when she and Scott signed up to run a skating school by themselves, they also signed themselves up for intermittent separation for five months of the year. Between their five teams, they have assignments at the Junior and Senior Grand Prix every few weeks, necessitating a trip abroad for one of them while the other stays behind to coach the remaining teams. 

Marie-France and Patrice made it clear that they’re always available to babysit a few teams if needs be, either at home or at competition, but the pair have done so much for them already that Tessa is hesitant to take further advantage of their kindness. Besides, she and Scott knew what they were getting into when they agreed to take on so many teams; Tessa’s not about to duck out on their responsibilities now that it’s starting to get tough.

But she’s not going to lie to herself — it _has_ been tough, tougher than maybe she realised it was going to be.

She and Scott both managed to get to the first JGP of the season, a short hop away in Quebec City, and although their results hadn’t been stellar, Maia and Tim suffering badly with nerves, and Reece and Nolan’s lack of training due to the sprained ankle showing them up, it had been nice to kick off the season together. Scott is going solo this week, accompanying Reece and Nolan to Uzbekistan for their second assignment. He flew out with them on Monday, and it’s now late — much too late — on Saturday evening, and Tessa is trying and failing to distract herself from counting down the hours until the three of them land in Montreal again.

Her sleep over the past week has been restless at best, finding that she’s grown too used to having someone else in the bed with her. In a half-asleep, listless haze, it’s disconcerting to throw an arm out, expecting the presence of a warm, solid body and find only empty space. She told Scott as much on the third night, joking that if this continued, they would have to get a dog to keep the bed warm when either of them are away — only she’s a little worried by how seriously he seems to have latched onto the idea.

In the days since, he’s spent most of his free time sending her links to dog adoption pages, each one as invariably heart-meltingly, soul-stealingly adorable as the one before.

At five a.m. on Thursday morning she gets a picture of a grey-muzzled, goofy-looking labrador with his tongue sticking out, accompanied by a text from Scott.

_This is Grandpa Rolando. He loves naps, pamper time, and taking life at a slow pace (feel like we could learn a thing or two!)._

Twenty minutes later, she gets: _Oh my god this one has three legs LOOK. Tess we could build him a doggy stair lift in the new place. I could put him in a little sling and wear him to work! The possibilities are ENDLESS!!!!!!_

She’s finally managed to work her way through the muscle relaxation sleep technique she’s been trying, and is moments away from dropping off when her phone buzzes on her bedside table, waking her up again.

_T, this one is called LUNCHBOX and he has a little white butt and I’m sorry but I think I might love him more than you._

_I might too if you keep sending me dog pictures at five in the morning,_ she texts him back, and he shuts up for a while.

While it’s fun to indulge in the brief fantasy that they’ll ever be home long enough to get a pet, none of it changes the fact of the matter that Tessa thinks she might be going a little bit crazy with how much she misses Scott.

In the grand scheme of things, she and Scott have been apart for far longer than six days. They spent years separated from one another after retirement. Once upon a time, there was nothing Tessa wanted more than to actively distance herself from Scott, to prove to herself that she could be a functioning human being outside of the safety net of their partnership. But over the past year she’s grown accustomed to having him there. Their life together has been gradually built — coaching, the day-to-day running of their skating school, the slow, careful work on their relationship — to a point where she sees more of Scott than anyone else in the world, has become used to his constant presence. 

It makes his absence all the more stark.

She’s been able to keep herself busy enough that she doesn’t think about it too much at the rink, preoccupied with preparing their remaining teams for their next assignments, but things are different at home. They haven’t had time since the move to properly unpack, and the downstairs is still crammed full of packing boxes and haphazardly arranged items of furniture standing where they were left by the moving company. Tessa tries to make headway on it in her free time or in the early hours of the morning when she can’t sleep, hoping for a good distraction, but her thoughts inevitably end up drifting the way of her absent partner whenever she uncovers a Leafs coffee mug, or the hideous, glittering red Team Canada cowboy hat that Scott had insisted on packing despite all of Tessa’s attempts to throw it away.

Early on Saturday, she’d unpacked Scott’s recipe books, propping them all up on the kitchen counters even though they clashed horribly with the new marble countertops. They’re not books, really, only loose-leafed collections of recipes that Scott has hole-punched and squashed into colourful ring binders. His messy handwriting is scrawled across every spare inch of paper, noting ingredient replacements and alterations to cooking times, suggested uses for leftovers, and it made her heart ache a little to read his familiar scrawl. It’s wonderful to have a space of their own, a blank slate for them to fill with their own memories, but the presence of so many of their things only serves to remind her of the most important missing component.

And at — she throws an arm over to her bedside table, pulling her phone towards her with her fingertips and checking the time — fuck, _long_ gone midnight on a Saturday evening, there’s only so many times she can toss and turn before she admits defeat and heads back downstairs to continue unpacking.

Unsurprisingly, the Tessa that arrives at the Montréal-Trudeau International Airport the following morning is more than a little worse for wear. Scott waits until they’re back in the car, having seen Reece and Nolan safely off to their parents’ care, before turning to her with a smile that’s a fraction too amused for her liking.

“Rough night, huh?” he says lightly, as he taps the sunglasses on the dashboard, the ones she’d thrown on in the airport to mask her frighteningly large eye bags. “I almost missed you in arrivals, you know. It’s good to know you’ve got the undercover celeb look down.”

“I’m passing out on the sofa as soon as we get back home,” Tessa mumbles, pulling her knees up to her chest and dropping her head down against them. “I’m sleeping, and I’m not waking up until Monday morning.”

Scott gives her a cheeky grin. “So much for my triumphant return home, eh? I thought there’d be a bit more enthusiasm for a returning hero! Third place at their second JGP? I wouldn’t go as far as saying I’m a miracle worker, but…”

She tries to give him a smile, because she’s proud of him, she really is; third place for Reece and Nolan is a huge achievement, and she was over the moon when his text came through confirming it. He deserves to celebrate. But the line of her lips must be a little too tight, her smile pulled too thin across a weary frame, because Scott drops the wise-assery in an instant.

“Hey, sorry,” he says, slipping his hand across to gently massage the back of her neck. “Was it that bad? You should’ve slept in this morning, I could have gotten a cab. Let’s do that next time, yeah?”

“No, it’s fine,” she sighs, the words heavy on her tongue. “I doubt being at home this morning would have made a difference anyway.”

“Did you sleep at all?”

She tips her head forwards, allowing him access to work his thumb down the tight line of muscle along the back of her neck. 

“Mm. Not really. Maybe half an hour. It all got a little hazy at four a.m.”

When she tilts her head towards him, flashing him a heavy-lidded smile, he doesn’t smile back.

“Has it been like this all week?” he says, and when she gives a weak little shrug that denies nothing: “Shit, Tess, I wish you’d have told me…”

“I did tell you. I told you on Wednesday.”

Never matter that the conversation had been little more than an off-hand comment, their daily calls focused on getting across key developments with their teams as quickly as possible before Scott shot off to the rink to supervise morning practice, and Tessa turned in for the night.

“You said you were having ‘trouble getting to sleep’. You didn’t say you hadn’t slept at _all_. Were you coaching by yourself the whole week?”

She closes her eyes, half out of drowsiness and half out of a desire to avoid this whole issue. She wishes he wouldn’t make a huge deal out of this sort of thing; it’s hardly been a healthy week for her, but it’s not the end-of-the-world kind of scenario that he seems to think it is whenever the topic of her wellbeing comes up. 

“Of course I was,” she says, steadily. “Who else would have been there to help?”

“Tess, that’s not good for you. You know you can just shout up to Marie or Patch if you—”

“Maybe I don’t feel like shouting up to Marie and Patch when we’ve already relied on them for _everything_ , Scott. Maybe I know it’s not okay, because I’m the one who hasn’t been able to sleep all week, while you’ve been off in Uzbekistan winning every medal there is to win. Maybe I’ve thought about all these things already, and maybe I’ve decided that I can make my own choices and suffer my own consequences. Did you consider that?”

It’s hardly a meltdown, but it’s as close to an argument as she and Scott ever get, and abrupt silence fills the air.

Tessa immediately regrets her words. She doesn’t mean them; the exhaustion is making her irritable and snappy, and she doesn’t have the energy for the conversation that Scott is trying to start right now.

“Scott,” she starts, opening her eyes again to find that he’s looking down at his hands, his brow furrowed and his lips pursed in contemplation. “I’m sorry, I didn’t — I didn’t mean that, you know I didn’t.”

Quietly, he turns the key in the ignition, does up his seatbelt. “It’s okay.”

“I don’t think it is, I—”

“It’s _okay_ , T,” he says, turning to her with obvious concern in his eyes. “We’ll talk later. You should get some sleep first. Please.”

She doubts she’ll be able to fall asleep now, even with him back. But he’s asking her to try, and she has just bitten off his head without so much as a friendly hello, so she does the right thing in the situation and pretends to sleep.

A couple of minutes into the drive, despite herself and the quiet sense of unease permeating the car, she does actually fall asleep. Scott shakes her gently awake when they arrive home, knowing she would rather spend all night in the car than have him carry her back into the house like a child, and she wakes long enough to trudge indoors, kick off her shoes and pull on a loose sleep shirt and a pair of cotton shorts, before passing out again on the bed. 

She has no idea how long she sleeps, but it is blissfully deep and dreamless. (Except the one point in the afternoon when she’s pretty sure she wakes up to Scott humming the Pink Panther theme tune under his breath as he rummages through their bedroom drawers. Her brain is pretty loopy with lack of sleep by this point, so she may well have dreamt the whole thing.)

At any rate, the real Scott is sprawled out peacefully beside her when she wakes up next. There’s no clock in the bedroom, but Tessa guesses that it must be close to evening: late enough that the golden autumn sun has almost slipped beyond the horizon, the last burnished rays of light clinging to roofs and treetops when she pokes her head up from the bed to peer through the balcony windows.

The house is still and silent, the only audible noises the faint ticking of the clock in the hallway and Scott’s soft breathing.

She looks down at him, fast asleep and breathing gently through his nose. His hands are jack-knifed at odd angles above his head, and there’s a book open on the pillow beside him, his reading glasses still dangling precariously off the tip of his nose. He must have come through to keep her company and dozed off in the process, jet lag catching up with him.

God, she feels like an asshole. She _is_ an asshole. 

Carefully, she removes the glasses from his face and sets them back in the case on his bedside table, gently re-arranges his arms to a more comfortable position. His hair has flopped forwards in front of his face; it’s getting longer now, since she asked him to grow it out because she likes it that way, and she feels a sudden surge of guilt run through her. 

Scott doesn’t deserve her anger. She knows that all he wants is for her to take care of herself, the same way that she would want him to take care of himself. He simply bears the brunt of that responsibility because she’s the one with the tendency to work herself straight into the ground.

With a brief sigh, she flops back down onto the bed.

They’ll talk about it when he wakes up. 

For now, she contemplates sneaking downstairs to continue unpacking, but the thought stirs up so much anxiety in her about the current state of the house that she decides to just stay put.

While the rest of their house looks like Marie Kondo’s worst nightmare, the bedroom was one of the few rooms where there wasn’t much work to be done beyond repainting the walls and stripping back the carpet. Consequently, it’s the only room in the house where Tessa feels a vague sense of peace, rather than overwhelming stress about everything that needs to be fixed or moved or unpacked or built. 

The furnishings in their bedroom are simple and classic: black lacquered bedside tables and drawers, a matching dresser and closet for Scott’s clothes, Tessa’s being kept in the walk-in closet at the back of the room. A vase of fresh pink tulips sits on the top of the dresser, next to a chain of little carved elephants that Tessa’s mother sent them as a moving gift. There are only a few large pieces of furniture in the room, the space generously sized for what it contains, but Tessa thinks of the room as minimal, not sparse. She likes the cleanliness of the lines, the way the room opens up at the front with a gorgeous balcony. 

Here, she and Scott have something that is equally and only theirs, not just haphazard attempts at squeezing a few of Scott’s things into Tessa’s crammed apartment closets, or an attic room in a home that Scott made with somebody else. Here, there always seems to be space enough for her to breathe.

Exhaling slowly, she takes the time to stretch out her complaining muscles, tight and knotted from the stress of the week. When she looks back down at Scott, she’s startled to see his eyes open, staring straight back at her.

“Jesus _Christ—”_ she stutters. “You can’t _do_ that to people.”

He just blinks back at her, looking not even a little bleary-eyed, which suggests to Tessa that he’s been at this for at least the past few minutes that she’s been staring up at the ceiling, contemplating her existence and her love for their classically-designed bedroom furniture.

“You’re not ‘people’,” he says. “I’d be pretty offended if you called me ‘people’. Anyway, am I not allowed to look at you any more? Six days apart and you won’t even let me stare at your beautiful face?”

“No,” she says. “Not if you’re going to be creepy about it.”

She attempts to bring her foot up to poke him in the ribs, but he easily bats her strike away, instead catching her ankle and using it to hold her in place.

“So cruel,” he says, voice rasping a little over the syllables, and despite the fact that Tessa is very certain that they _do_ need to have a Big Conversation and that this Big Conversation cannot be passed over in favour of having sex, she still feels her stomach tighten in a way that reminds her that it _has_ been six full days since they last saw each other, and those days have been particularly long and particularly lonely. 

If the look in Scott’s eyes as she stares back at him and the way his fingers press in slightly across the jut of her ankle are any indication, he’s reminded of the same thing. 

It’s not like they’ve been at it like rabbits ever since moving in together; by the time they get back from the rink most days they’re too tired to do anything beyond scrape a meal together, shower and collapse into bed, but six days is somewhat of a drought, and the time difference hasn’t made life any easier. Trying to get off over FaceTime is hard enough under the best of circumstances. Somehow she doesn’t think they would find any more success if Scott was trying to talk dirty to her over his breakfast cereal. 

“I missed you,” he says, with a hint of huskiness, as his fingers begin tracing small circles at her ankle. 

She sucks in a breath. It seems the Big Conversation is waiting until later tonight, which she can’t say she disagrees with; she and Scott don’t get much of an opportunity at make-up sex. 

”I missed you too.”

“How much?” 

His gaze is sharp with focused intensity, taking in everything he’s missed over the past week; her eyes bright and cheeks slightly flushed already; the softness of her mouth, the wetness when she runs her tongue across her bottom lip quickly.

“So — so much,” she says, the faint traces of tension from their earlier argument making her a little jittery. “I missed you so much.” 

He’s not pulling at her ankle any more, but she goes with him anyway, narrowing the gap between their bodies. 

His hand slips up along her calf. “Tell me.” 

“I — I missed you at the rink, sitting next to me each day,” she says, shivering at his touch. Her skin prickles with the need to feel his hands across her, everywhere at once, sparked against the sharpened awareness of his absence. “I missed you in the house, in the front room. In the kitchen, even your stupid songs in the shower. In the — the bedroom, I—” 

Scott’s hand is halfway up her leg now, trailing along the soft dip of skin at the back of her knee, and she can feel her breathing stall as he starts up her thigh. 

“What else, Tess?” he says, his voice rough already.

“I missed you in the bed, in our bed. Feeling you next to me,” she breathes, shifting on her side to open up her hips a little. “Your warmth, listening to you breathe when you’re sleeping. Your hands on me, on my — my skin, the way you touch—” 

His hand skims the hem of her loose cotton shorts, and she briefly loses her train of thought, before remembering it again when Scott slips his hand inside her shorts to cup her ass. 

“Here?” he says, leaning forwards to press his lips to her neck as he begins massaging the tight muscle. His mouth is hot and wet against her skin, and she feels the nerve endings buzzing at the contact, like she’s drunk without touching a drop of alcohol. Her thighs squeeze together. 

Six days is _far_ too long. 

“Not there,” she stutters, even as she pushes her hips backwards, rocking gently into his hand as he squeezes, his fingers _digging_ in with just the right amount of pressure— 

“Where, T?” He mouths at her collarbone, pulling down the neckline of her shirt to press slick, open-mouthed kisses to her chest and sternum, right down between the valley of her breasts. “Tell me where, and I’ll give it to you.” 

His free hand goes to her ankle, guiding her leg over his hip to open her up to him, and _fuck_ him, he knows exactly where, he just wants her to say it out loud. 

“Scott—” 

She whines his name, twisting her hips, but he ignores her in favour of pushing her shirt up across her toned stomach and cupping a breast in one hand. 

“Where do you want it, Tess? You gotta tell me.” 

His fingers circle her nipple, teasing, and she moans. He knows exactly what’ll get her off, what’ll have her weak at the knees and wet down his wrist, utterly wrecked. 

Some days he gives it to her as quickly as she likes (and she likes it _quick_ , being fucked fast and hard in the entrance hallway amongst the mountains of packing boxes and opened luggage cases). Days like today, he makes her work just as hard as she makes him, and each time Tessa gives him complete permission to do it all over again. 

“Please,” she gasps, as he lowers his head to fasten his lips around her breast, his teeth grazing lightly across her hardened nipple. “ _Please_ , Scott—” 

The flick of a tongue, and she’s pressing her thighs together so hard that she thinks she might explode. The inner seam of her thighs is sticky with wetness, and she _aches_ , so badly, needs to be filled.

“Tell me, baby,” he mutters. “Tell me where you want it.” 

“Inside me, _fuck—”_ She reaches down with a hand, grasps his wrist, well past the point of reticence now. “I need your fingers inside me—” 

“Good girl,” he says, and keeps his eyes fixed firmly on her face as he sinks two fingers inside her. 

Her toes curl up against the bedsheets, muscles tightening instinctively against the flood of sensation that ripples through her, a live current tripping every switch. 

“ _Fuck_ , Scott—” 

He doesn’t waste time, knows exactly how she likes it: two fingers spread inside her, stretching her out, keeping her deliciously wet. With his other hand, he hooks aside her shorts and rubs hard at her clit, already swollen pink and sensitive, the sensation making her tremble. 

She was wet before they even started, and she can hear it now, the slick, filthy noises that his hand makes as he slowly pumps his fingers into her. Scott looks down between them, watching where his fingers disappear into her, watching her hips push up to meet his hand with each thrust. 

If she looks down, she can see herself too; the angle of her leg hooked high around his hip opens her up so that she’s laid bare, and she feels an absurd surge of nerves run through her — like he hasn’t seen it all a hundred times before, like she hasn’t done it all a hundred times before — but it’s different somehow when she can look down and watch herself being fucked. 

It’s not enough to make her uncomfortable, but it’s — it’s odd, to look down and see herself laid open so clearly like that.

“Easy,” Scott mutters, his hand moving from her clit to her hip, thumbing across the shallow ridge of her hip bone. “You okay?”

He would stop in a heartbeat if she wanted him to, but she finds herself clenching tighter and tighter as she watches him thrust slowly inside her, and she gives a distracted nod. His fingers come out shiny and slick; she can see her own wetness on them, glistening in the dim light of the fading afternoon. The sight sparks something low in her belly, something new. 

She’s still dripping wet, begging for him, and when he pushes his fingers back inside her, they both moan. 

“See how wet you are for me, baby,” he says, so quiet that she’d barely hear it if the evening wasn‘t so still and silent. "See how fucking wet, how _good_ you take me—” 

He slips a third finger inside her, and she sucks in a breath as she watches herself stretch and tremble around him. 

“You’re so fucking good for me, Tess. _So_ good. God, baby, you don’t even know how you feel. You take me so fucking well—” 

He was talking to reassure her at first, letting her brain focus on his words and his familiarity, but now she knows he’s talking to turn her on. The pace of his hand increases, his fingers no longer pulling out of her completely, and her eyelids flutter, her thighs starting to shake. She fights the urge to screw up her eyes and ride her pleasure out against his hand, wants to watch herself take it. 

“Scott—” she stutters, as he spreads his fingers just slightly inside her, and her hips buck upwards. “Fuck, Scott—” 

“What is it?” His voice is shot through, rough with desire, and she knows he’s close too. He can get close just from watching her; it’s a source of selfish pride.

“Need you—” 

He does that _thing_ with his fingers, twisting them out before pushing them deep back into her again, and she almost comes right there and then. 

“ _Fuck, Scott,_ please—” 

“I know, baby, I know, I can feel you so fucking tight around my fingers, you’re almost there—” 

She feels more than good; she feels like she’s orbiting the Earth, body so far ahead of her brain that she’s not sure it’ll ever catch up again. She could come in a heartbeat, watching his fingers slide into her, the tendons flexing and splaying in his hand as he angles it just right. But she wants him with her too.

Abandoning words, she fumbles with the waistband of his pyjama bottoms, fingers questing past the familiar thatch of soft hair down to where he waits, rock hard. His eyes darken as soon as she takes him in hand, an exhaled breath hissing softly through his clenched teeth, and he helps her ease his pyjama pants down below his hips, pulling her closer so they’re at the right angle. Her leg remains hooked behind his hip, spreading her open, and she shakes her head when he goes to move it back down to their usual position. 

“I want — I want to watch,” she says. “Is that okay?” 

For a moment, Scott looks like he might have lost the power of speech. “More than okay,” he says hoarsely, with the look of a man whose wildest dreams have just come true (and really, if Tessa had known this was going to be such a thing for him, she would have made full use of it months ago.) 

He shifts along the bed, considering for a moment before reaching over to grab a pillow and tuck it behind her hips. 

“How’s that? Can you see?” 

She could see well enough the way they were positioned before, but when she looks down this time — _oh._ The addition of the pillow has pushed her hips forwards, and Scott’s adjusted position means that her legs are splayed wider, wide enough for her to see flushed pink and glistening, aching wetness.

It doesn’t feel obscene, and she realises as she mumbles a distracted confirmation, and he lines himself up at her entrance that it shouldn’t. This is her own body, hers from head to toe, and hers even where it joins with his. 

Her hand comes up to clutch at the back of his shoulder, readying herself, and she wants to kiss him, she wants to kiss him, but more than that, she only wants to watch as he sinks into her, achingly and beautifully slow. 

She feels herself moan before she realises she even allowed the sound out. His cock is thick and flushed, veins protruding against the skin, and she watches as she takes it, inch by inch, her thighs twitching with the unreleased tension, before he settles against her, fully sheathed. 

Her fingernails are digging into his shoulder, she realises, but he doesn’t seem to mind; only swears quietly when she uses the leverage of her leg behind his hip to push herself even further onto him. 

“Jesus fucking _Christ_ , Tess,” he groans, turning his face into the mattress. 

“Too much?” 

“No, it’s perfect,” he says, holding himself still inside her. “You’re perfect. But you’re so fucking _tight_ , I don’t know how long I’m gonna hold out, I don’t — I wanna make this good for you.” 

She reaches up to brush the sweat-damp hair away from his face, cupping the side of his cheek with a hand that quickly trails down to his shoulder, steadying herself. 

“It’s okay,” she says. “I can do the work.” 

“Are you su—” His voice chokes off abruptly as she pushes herself almost completely off his cock and slides back down again, using her leg behind his hip to keep herself in position. “Yeah, ok, you’re sure.” 

“It’s okay if you come,” she says, beginning to pant with exertion, chasing the tension that spikes in her. “I can keep going until I finish.” 

She’s not sure whether it’s her words or the way her eyes slide back between them to watch where their bodies meet that makes Scott shudder and push his hips into her; but either way, it makes her toes curl with pleasure and her thighs shake, so _close_.

As much as she tries to keep her movements controlled and rhythmic, there’s nothing pretty about the way they fuck, both wanting to chase the other over the edge. She watches his cock slick into her, the way he opens her up with the press of his hand at her thigh, how his cock comes out wet with her own slickness, smeared along the length of him. 

When she takes him all in one, she watches how his hips twist up to fuck right into her, thrusting roughly against her with a quiet slap of skin. He’s so deep inside her, so thick and full against her clenching walls that if she wasn’t watching, she’d hardly be sure where he ended and she began. 

“Faster,” she pants, and although she’s the one doing the majority of the work, he duly quickens the rocking of his hips to meet her. 

“Fuck, Tess, I’m — I’m close,” he gasps, as she pivots down onto him.

She would usually reach a hand down to her clit at this point, or get Scott to do it for her, but she doesn’t want to obstruct her view; besides, she has a feeling she won’t need the extra motivation this time. Wrapping her hand around the back of Scott’s neck, she lets her mouth fall open so he can hear the brief, hitching gasp every time she fucks herself down onto him, broken every so often with a soft groan as he pushes back up against her. 

“It’s — it’s okay,” she breathes, her head bowed, thighs rippling with exertion. “I want you to come.” 

His body jerks forwards, and he gives a stuttering groan. “Now?” 

“Please,” she says, pressing her forehead against his chest so she can feel his skin, flushed and burning with heat, as slick with sweat as her own, and it’s the final thing she needs to tell him what she really wants him to do. “I want to watch you come inside me.” 

She’s glad she knows Scott exceptionally well and had prepared for the effect of her words on him, because he comes practically on the spot. 

He thrusts into her, hard and fast, groaning so loudly that it makes her grateful they don’t have any neighbours. Between her legs, she watches his cock push into her, quicker and less controlled with each thrust; she can see the shiny trail of his pre-come dripping from his cock and onto the bed, and when he goes completely stiff and silent against her, she can feel him come inside her: thick, hot spurts that have her clenching around his shaking cock and finding her own release. 

In the shuddering aftermath, he thrusts gently into her, emptying himself completely before stilling — but he doesn’t go to pull out, and she doesn’t want him to. 

In the early days of their rekindled relationship, he would pull out as quickly as possible, like he was worried she’d regret what had happened if he gave her long enough to think about it; now he knows better. She likes feeling him there, soft and heavy, all-encompassing. His arms slip around her, and they breathe together for a few minutes, letting the flush fade from them and the heat cool on their skin. 

Then, the stickiness of sweat (and the mixture of other fluids that seem way less sexy removed from the heat of the moment) becomes gross enough for her to peel reluctantly away from his embrace and take herself off to the shower. 

“Don’t wanna stay here in our sweat cocoon for a few minutes more?” Scott grins, propping himself up on an elbow to watch with undisguised appreciation as she pads round to the foot of the bed. “It’s nice and cosy.” 

Tessa raises an eyebrow at him. “You make it sound so appealing.” 

She’s feeling more than a little boneless, so she’s pleasantly surprised her legs don’t give out on her as she reaches up to the hanger on the back of the bedroom door and unhooks her towel from the peg she left it on. 

As she walks into the bathroom, leaving the door open, she can hear Scott exhale. 

“Fuck me,” he calls, faintly. “Maybe one of us should go away every week.” 

She grins, making sure to raise her voice so he catches every word. ”It’s not long until Croatia, you know. You might want to be careful what you wish for.”   
  


* * *

  
Croatia, it turns out, is a much more successful affair all round. 

It helps that neither of the teams Tessa accompanies are expecting anything more than a good skate; Maia and Tim are in the middle of their debut junior season, very clearly the youngest and most inexperienced of a strong field, and Niamh and Joe, while looking to solidify their position as Great Britain’s top junior team, aren’t likely to threaten for the podium. She and Scott have taken care to manage expectations with all of their teams. They know where they want to be by the Olympics, but there’s plenty of groundwork to lay first. 

They’re good kids, all four of them. All their teams are, even the ones that occasionally get on her nerves with endless chatter and a woefully short attention span, heads turned whenever somebody new and shiny walks into the rink. They all bring something different to the table, committed to building upon their strengths and improving upon their weaknesses. Most of all, they’re easy to get along with, which she finds herself very grateful for on her first solo trans-Atlantic coaching trip. 

Scott had poked gentle fun at her before she left, when she was telling him that the part of the trip she was most nervous for wasn’t anything to do with the competition; it was the thought of six days of hotel breakfasts and dinners out, hours upon hours of small talk with kids at least half her age. Her tolerance for small talk is a one-and-done kind of thing, designed for making polite conversation with people she meets once at a charity gala and then never again. Six straight days with the same people is something _far_ out of her comfort zone.

In the taxi on the way to the airport, Scott had texted her a link to a webpage: _50 Conversation Starters for Family Dinner Time_ , followed by a winky face, a thumbs up and three sweat drop emojis that she thinks he meant to represent nervousness, but looked kind of suggestive in the context of the winky face. 

She’d scoffed, shot him back a rolled-eyes emoji, and proceeded to read the entire page. 

As per usual, it turned out that she needn’t have worried. There was a brief moment of awkwardness in the airport lounge, when she had run out of polite questions about how Niamh’s weekend went and whether Tim had managed to sort his schoolwork for the week, where she momentarily considered dropping conversation starter number 34 into the mix.

But no sooner had she paused for breath than Maia swooped in with an offer (or perhaps an order) to show Tim and Joe the new game she’d downloaded on her phone, Niamh settled into her seat with a dog-eared copy of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, plugging her headphones into her ears, and Tessa was left entirely to her own devices.

 _Convo starters were a success_ , she texts Scott, watching over the top of her phone as Joe thumbs repeatedly at the app that Maia has pulled up for him, the younger girl watching eagerly over his shoulder, pushing her long hair out of her face to point out directions.

Her phone buzzes with Scott’s reply. _Which one did you go for?_

_The one where they amuse themselves for the next six hours and I get to read my book in peace._

_Ahh, technology. A beautiful invention._

In another pleasing turn up for the books, she does not finish the week apart from Scott looking like a freshly-deceased corpse. Sleep isn’t as easy as it normally is for her, but she gets enough uninterrupted rest to feel halfway towards a human being in the mornings.

If anyone _ever_ found out that the reason she’s able to drift off to sleep now is that she gets Scott to record her audio clips of him reading out loud, she thinks she might burn up and disappear off the face of the planet with embarrassment. But it works, and she’s not going to turn down something that gets her the eight hours a night that she so desperately needs. 

It doesn’t matter what he reads, so long as it’s his voice; he sends a new clip through every day, readings plucked from books she recognises and others she doesn’t. Over text, he jokes that he’ll finally get through all the books that she’s put next to his bedside table for months now, stacking them up so high that they almost block out the wall lamp next to the headboard.

Monday is Robinson Crusoe, Tuesday the first few pages of A Gentleman in Moscow. 

She texts him in the morning on Wednesday, full of self-doubt after a particularly rough training session, and he sends her half a chapter of Pride and Prejudice, stumbling over the unfamiliarity of the language but the roughshod warmth of his voice carries her through.

On Saturday night, when she’s suffered through three pages of the Ice Dance Technical Handbook the night before, she gets an audio recording that is decidedly _not_ meant to send her to sleep, and it turns out that Scott can in fact be very sexy as just a voice in her ear. She makes him repeat the performance for her when she’s back in Montreal on Sunday, and gets to show him just how grateful she is for the week of uninterrupted sleep.

Their current travelling situation may have its downsides, but they learn to make the most of their Sunday afternoons.  
  


* * *

  
The remaining few competitions of the Grand Prix season pass quickly, if not easily, and the months tumble onwards. Winter takes hold of the city once more, familiar carpets of snow blanketing the cobbled streets of Old Montreal and the rooftops of the slick high-rises, thick frost cracking across the surface of the Saint Lawrence river. The sharp scent of the cold fills the air, daggering at the lungs with each breath, and Tessa finds herself glad for the mercifully short walk from the parking lot to the rink interior, even gladder for the newly acquired space heater in the dance studio.

Their office is still very much a work in progress, Tessa embroiled in a debate with the building owners about the alternative uses of the half-empty storage room on the upper floor. For now, they have a few chairs and a table stacked up at the back of the studio, and a small television on a trolley that gets wheeled out whenever they need to put anything up on a screen.

The kids get more use out of the television than she and Scott. She’ll often come back after lunch on a Saturday to find a handful of them sprawled across the chairs and table, arguing over who gets to choose the channel. Natalie keeps suggesting a movie night, and Tessa has promised that once the renovations on her and Scott’s place are finished, they’ll arrange some kind of get-together at the house.

Over the months, she’s grown accustomed to their little rink family, no longer balking at the thought of taking a few of them out for lunch, or spending half an hour providing a listening ear. Not so long ago, she would have taken great pains to avoid associating with her rinkmates outside of work hours. She’d known kids growing up who had nothing outside of skating: whose every minute of every hour, on the ice or off, was spent in the company of the same few people, head-in-the-sand in that insular community that so easily lost sight of its own unimportance.

The irony of the fact that she now spends almost every waking hour either in the rink or thinking about it isn’t lost on her. But she’s no longer afraid to admit that her identity is undeniably linked to both skating and to Scott. Those ties don’t chafe any more; they ground and they strengthen. Plus, to be perfectly honest, she’s much happier listening to Maia ramble harmlessly on about her older brother’s new puppy than the time Zach Donohue took her polite inquiry about his Harley Davidson as an invitation to give her a twenty-minute lesson on how to tune a motorbike. 

She’s comfortable with her little family and her new place in it (even if mother of ten was an accomplishment that she wasn’t really expecting to achieve at the age of thirty-seven, or ever). 

It’s her blood family that’s been taking more effort recently.

The thought of bringing Scott back to London has been high on her list of priorities ever since her reunion with Scott’s family in the summer, but the situation with her family is a little different. Her mother took the failure of their partnership post-retirement in a much more personal way, blamed Scott for failing to swallow his pride and reach out, for letting her disappear off to Paris without so much as a backward glance. Even mentioning Scott’s name was a taboo in family conversations for a good few years, and although Kate’s viewpoint has softened somewhat since Tessa’s return to Canada, it’s obvious that she’s still not entirely convinced by the transformation of their relationship. 

Tessa doesn’t blame her. Kate was the one who was there to witness their lowest point, saw first-hand the effect it had on Tessa. It’s frustrating to still worry about what her mother thinks of her boyfriend, but she knows that every one of her mother’s concerns come from the place of wanting the absolute best for her; and as of yet, Scott has not proven himself. He appeared in Tessa’s life again as quickly as he vanished the first time. Now, they need to convince Kate that he’s here to stay.

The tactic used on Scott’s family — namely, show up one day and hope everyone remembers who she is — will almost certainly fail on her mother, the kind of woman who sends out invitations to Thanksgiving dinner six months in advance. Every step has to be carefully planned and precisely executed: a series of steps that begins with Jordan breaking out the old photo albums of Tessa and Scott when visiting home one weekend, and ends with Scott’s successful reintroduction at the Virtue Christmas dinner.

Or, so the plan goes.

The frantic call that Tessa gets from Jordan while she’s in the middle of grocery shopping one evening, informing her that their mother has decided she’s not doing a family Christmas dinner this year, and is instead inviting just the three of them: Jordan, Tessa and Scott, to lunch on Saturday, if they can make it? 

That was not part of the plan. 

Jordan's car breaking down on the way over to Kate’s place and turning up three hours late was not part of the plan. 

Tessa and Scott, arriving on her mother’s doorstep without the expected Christmas family entourage of thirty plus people, enough noise and distraction for Scott not to be the centre of Kate’s attention for too long, was not part of the plan. 

But, as Tessa slips her hand into the crook of Scott‘s elbow and squeezes it encouragingly, watches his face regain a little of its usual colour, over the course of their career they’ve become excellent at faking it until they make it. 

As the door opens to reveal her mother, sharp eyes alighting on Scott almost immediately before turning to Tessa, it’s still up in the air which one they’ll get today. 

“Hi, Mom!” Tessa says, her smile wide and genuine as she steps up to give her mother a tight hug. “How’re you?” 

“Perfectly well, thank you, love,” Kate says, placing her hand on Tessa’s arm. “You’re looking very nice today. Is that a new coat?” 

“I thought I should make an effort,” Tessa grins, doing a little twirl for her mother, before stepping back and looking across to Scott. Despite the easy smile pasted across his face now, she knows how little sleep he got last night.

She slips her hand to the small of his back, feeling the unnatural stillness of his posture, watching his hand twitch by his side as he resists the urge to respond to Tessa’s touch with his own. 

“Hi, Ms. Virtue,” he says, looking up at her mother. “It’s great to see you again.”

Kate stares at him for a long moment, frosty gaze betraying nothing, before her eyebrow slowly creeps up. 

“I think we’ve earned first name terms, haven’t we? Don’t forget, I still remember you when you were running around naked in my backyard.”

“I won’t give you a repeat performance, I promise,” Scott grins.

A short laugh ripples out from her mother, and Tessa feels the tension sag out of her shoulders. 

“I wouldn’t worry,” Kate says. “It wouldn’t be by least the most unexpected thing to happen in this house.” She turns to head indoors, gesturing for them to follow. “Come on, then, I won’t make you stand out in this cold all day. Jordan will be a little while, I don’t know whether you heard but she’s had trouble with her car…”

As they make their way through the house, Scott leans close to Tessa’s ear.

“Yeah, she still hates me,” he whispers, and Tessa elbows him quickly in the side.

Still, the fact that he has enough confidence to joke about the situation bodes well. A few short hours ago, he was so nervous that he barely touched his specially-prepared breakfast of only lightly charred bacon and eggs.

They’re duly sorted out with drinks — water for Tessa, tea for Kate, and coffee for Scott, who desperately needs it — and escorted into the sitting room, where Kate settles down on the sofa opposite them, stirring her mug of tea slowly as she waits for it to cool.

In the somewhat awkward silence, Scott takes a gulp of his coffee, coughing when it burns his tongue. Tessa passes him her glass of water without comment, and watches Kate’s lips twitch upwards.

Someone is obviously having far too much fun with their evil stepmother role. 

“So...” Tessa prompts, giving her mother a meaningful raised eyebrow. 

“Oh, yes, it was lovely of you two to accept my offer,” Kate says, setting her mug down on the side table. “I’m very glad to have you here, even if we’re not doing Christmas this year.” 

Scott clears his throat, still wincing slightly from the scalding coffee. “It was our pleasure.” 

“Tessa tells me that the school is keeping you both very busy. You must be all over the place now, so many teams between you… where was it you were last? Croatia?”

“Japan, actually,” he says. “Croatia was Tess’s turn, and then we both managed to get out to Mississaugua, so Japan was on my watch. It wasn’t too bad, you know, it’s a long flight, but we love that country. There was a little bit of a scrap to see who got to go, eh?”

Technically it was less of a ‘scrap’ and more of a mutually beneficial bargaining process, but she’s not about to mention that to her mother. Kate’s approach to sex education was to hand Tessa a hardback book entitled “My Body and Me” at age thirteen, and never speak of the subject again. Somehow Tessa doubts that she’d want to hear anything more about her daughter’s sex life twenty years on.

“Oh, yes, I think I remember Tessa mentioning Japan,” Kate nods, taking a sip of her tea. “How did it go?”

“Pretty well, yeah. Natalie and Gabriel had a solid set of skates, and Katia and Ilya didn’t do too badly either. We’re actually off to Russian Nationals with them in a few weeks, both Tess and I.” He pauses for a moment, grinning. “Words I never thought I’d say, hey? Hopefully we come back in one piece.”

“We’ll be fine,” Tessa says quickly, nudging him — she doesn’t need her mother to get any more ideas.

“You’ll both be in Russia for Christmas, then?” Kate says.

“Yeah, we will. I guess we could have done it with just one of us, but it made sense, with this being our first time at Russian Nationals and all that… plus I couldn’t in good conscience let Tess suffer through Christmas Day without me. Leave her alone and she’d probably be eating microwave turkey and powdered mashed potatoes.”

Scott grins broadly at Kate, like he expects a good reaction, but all he gets is a thin, rather distracted smile.

“Yes, well,” Kate says, folding her hands together in her lap. “I won’t waste your time. I know you’re both very busy people, so I presume you’re not just here for the pleasure of my company, as lovely as it is to see you again.”

Tessa exchanges a look with Scott. Was it the powdered mashed potato joke? God, she hopes this isn’t where their painstaking work comes crashing down around them: dying on the sword of a terrible joke about her culinary ineptitude. 

“Um, Mom?” she ventures. “Sorry, but what exactly do you think we’re here for?”

“Well, you’re asking for my blessing, correct? Which you have, of course. I can’t say I understand your decisions, but you certainly seem happier now than you ever were in Paris. And although I’m still reserving opinion on your character, Scott, I will admit that I may have judged you too harshly in the past. My daughter has forgiven you, so perhaps it’s time for me to do the same. At the very least, I’m grateful to you for doing what I never could and convincing her to come back home, that’s…”

Kate trails off when she realises that the pair sat opposite her are both staring at her with identical blank expressions on their faces. There’s a brief beat of silence, wherein Tessa has to exert all her powers of self control to keep a straight face as her mother stares bemusedly back at them.

“What?” Kate says, her brow furrowing.

“Mom, we’re not getting married,” Tessa says, digging her fingernails into the side of Scott’s thigh as she feels him start to corpse with laughter. There’s not a chance in hell that she’s about to let him laugh in her mother’s face and ruin all the progress they’ve made so far — which is turning out to be considerably more than they realised.

“Sorry?” Kate blinks at them, glancing between the two with as much confusion as Tessa currently feels. “You’re not? Jordan said…”

“Uh-oh,” Scott mutters, under his breath, and Tessa’s eyes flash with warning.

_Jordan._

Of fucking course.   
  


* * *

  
Jordan’s defence, she will later outline to Tessa upon being cornered in the guest bedroom shortly after her arrival, in a car that definitely is not and was not _ever_ broken down, was that the two of them were taking things far too seriously, and she did them a favour by giving them an immediate icebreaker. 

Tessa can see her point. She still bans Jordan from ever contacting their mother on her behalf again before she heads back downstairs to rescue Scott from conversation with Kate.

Not, it turns out, that there’s much rescuing to be doing.

As Jordan predicted (frustratingly), Scott’s natural charm didn’t need much room to get going, and with the whole mess of the fake marriage, Kate’s guard has decidedly dropped. Tessa can hear the laughter from the living room before she’s even halfway down the stairs. She peers round the doorway into the living room to see Kate and Scott standing by one of the framed photos on the wall, Scott animatedly retelling some story that the photo has jogged in his memory, Kate listening with a small smile on her face.

The warmth of the moment is _almost_ worth the smug look on Jordan’s face when she joins Tessa in the hallway.

Her sister doesn’t need to say a single word: the “ _told you so_ ,” rings loud and clear.

“Alright, Moir, I don’t need my mother to fall in love with you as well as my sister,” Jordan says loudly, announcing her presence as she strolls into the room. 

“Hey, Jordan,” Scott grins, his gaze flicking from Jordan to Tessa, still half-hidden at the doorway. “Good to see you two didn’t kill each other up there.”

“It’s still on the agenda,” Tessa says, and Jordan turns to flash her a sweet smile.

Tessa will pretend to be offended for the next few weeks, and her sister will be insufferable in her righteousness, but truthfully, Tessa can’t quite believe what Jordan has managed to orchestrate here. She hadn’t hoped for much more than civil conversation. Yet here Scott is, charming her mother with a wink and a smile, and her mother is actually smiling back — a little reservedly, maybe, but a genuine _smile_.

They settle in with fresh cups of tea and coffee and sit and chat for hours, until the sky outside darkens with the coming night, and the only light through the windows is the soft glow of the street lamps, and still, Tessa has trouble wrapping her head around it.

She had worried about this moment for months. She’d pictured it going wrong in so many ways, imagined so many outcomes where there was no reconciliation between Scott and her mother: where she couldn’t bring him home for Christmas, or Thanksgiving, or birthdays, or weddings, where she’d have to tiptoe around his name in conversation for the next fifty years of her life, where she would always feel like there was a part of her that her mother had rejected.

She hadn’t allowed herself to imagine this, the kind of future where they get it all — but she does now.

And God, she wants everything. She wants a life that lasts in Montreal. She wants to be part of his family, wants him to be part of hers. She wants a whole life spent together, decades of growing up and growing old. She wants to be there when his hair turns grey and his bones grow tired, and all they have left is the quiet devotion that has underpinned their every moment of every day for as long as she can remember.

For the first time, she’s finally starting to believe that they might get what they want.

And as she catches Scott’s eye with a small smile, watches him look back at her, his dark eyes quiet and kind and peaceful, she knows that he believes it too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The biggest of thanks go to my wonderful beta Marie, and to E. and C. for their additional input. 
> 
> Thank you to you for reading this marathon chapter! Please let me know your thoughts either in the comment section below, or over [@virtueoso](http://virtueoso.tumblr.com/ask) on Tumblr and [@virtueosos](http://twitter.com/virtueosos) on Twitter. I’d love to hear from you. 
> 
> More to come soon.


	2. year one - part two

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for the lovely comments on the first chapter! This universe is so close to my heart, it's been wonderful to know that other people feel the same way. 
> 
> Due credit goes to TSwift for providing the unofficial theme song of this fic. I've listened to Peace so many times while writing these chapters that I now have a Pavlovian urge to write whenever I hear it being played. If you haven't listened to it yet, it's gorgeous and [highly worth the four minutes.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HpxX4ZE4KWE)

After nearly three decades in the sport, the days of Tessa’s “firsts” in skating — first gold medal, first international competition, first nervous puke in the toilets before warmup — are long gone. She ticked pretty much every major event off within the first decade, has visited too many obscure European cities to count, place names that sound like they were made up just to get maximum points on a Scrabble board. She’s competed in rinks that were barely large enough to fit the judges along one side and a handful of family members along the other, has shed blood, sweat and tears to win medals made from plastic, unwieldy crystal trophies, and a Rolex watch that now sits in a box at the bottom of her underwear drawer, keeping her gym socks separate from her tights.

So she likes to think she has a pretty broad knowledge of the skating world and all its associated moving parts, competitions and federations. It’s all the same in the end anyway, every ice dancer submitting to the same grind of daily training, the same rigors, nerves and pressures. But she has to admit, standing by the boards at the Yubileiny Sports Palace, supervising the last practice session before her team competes in the rhythm dance at Russian Nationals, this is a new one for her.

Her experience of Russia has been limited to a handful of Grand Prix competitions, one or two Christmas shows when they needed money. Never Nationals, a competition held straight across the Christmas break every year which always held a certain amount of mystique for Tessa, no matter how many times she told herself that there was nothing the Russians could be doing at their Nationals that was _so_ different to hers. Russian Nationals probably had the same volunteer organizer who had been around for as long as anyone could remember; the same cluster of rink grannies sitting third row back at every single event; the same well-intentioned, near-inedible breakfast laid on by the organizing committee the mornings of competition (and the same coffee shop round the corner that Tessa would duck out to instead to get a double espresso so strong it would make her hair stand on end.)

It’s just a figure skating competition, and once you’ve been to a few hundred of them, you’ve been to them all.

At least, that’s what she tells herself as she stands by the boards, feeling hopelessly out of place among the line-up of stoic Russian coaches watching practice with equally impassive stares. Her herringbone trench coat sticks out a mile against a sea of fur coats. Even the Team Russia puffer jacket that she convinced Scott to throw on looks odd on him, although it’s better than the godawful duffer coat he spent ten minutes modelling in front of the mirror before she intervened. 

She recognises every single one of the coaches posted along the boards, a parade of Russian ice dance royalty. The man closest to them, cutting an imposing figure in his six and a half feet of height, is Alexander Kharkov, coach to the Olympic bronze medalists from Calgary. The stout, grey-haired woman a little further along, in the middle of barking orders to her skaters, is Tatiana Mikhailova, whose junior teams have dominated the circuit for the past three years. There’s Maxim and Elizaveta Nazarov, a husband and wife team based out of Moscow with a reputation for resurrecting the careers of seniors considered long past their prime. Elizaveta caught Tessa’s eye when they first entered the rink and gave her the closest thing to a smile that Tessa has seen from anyone but Scott all morning. At the furthest end of the rink, there’s a pair that Tessa recognises immediately from her hours watching Katia and Ilya’s old skates: Oksana Aristova and Artem Gorshkov, the coaching duo who guided Katia and Ilya from infancy to a Junior World title and beyond. Up until six months ago, of course.

The pair’s move to Montreal has come with all the controversy that Tessa expected. There’s never any room for nuance in such conversations; either she and Scott are scheming villains who poached Katia and Ilya from a coaching team who had invested heart and soul into their success, or they’re heroes who rescued the pair from a suffocating, joyless environment that would have left them, at best, with an Olympic medal and a hollow victory. At worst, they might not have made it anywhere near that Olympic Village.

Tessa’s inclined to the grey in-between. After so many years, thousands of hours of training, it would be impossible for Aristova and Gorshkov _not_ to care, at least in their own way. But she’s seen the effects of their coaching style first-hand. It’s taken six months of work to reach the point where Katia and Ilya will freely volunteer their own thoughts during choreography sessions; where their circuits in the gym are functional and rounded, muscle definition beginning to replace the thin, narrow lines of Katia’s body; where Tessa can be certain that when they say they’re happy with something, they genuinely are.

She knows what they’re providing for Katia and Ilya, the worth of that. But by the amount of side-eye thrown in their direction, Tessa thinks she can guess which way public opinion is leaning among the select circle of individuals at the rink for morning practice.

“You’d think they would have more important things to do than stare at us for half an hour,” she mutters to Scott, leaning across to murmur the words out of the side of her mouth, and watches his face twitch up into a brief smile.

“Don’t tell me you’re not kind of flattered,” he says lowly, eyes fixed on Katia and Ilya as they stroke around the rink. “This is the most attention anyone’s paid to us in years. We don’t even get this kind of respect from the kids.”

“Speak for yourself, I got a Christmas present from Maia the other day.”

“Pretty sure that was a _joint_ present, Tess.”

“A footnote at the bottom of the card doesn’t count,” Tessa says. “She obviously likes me more, my name was in calligraphy. Yours looked like a drunk chicken had run across the page.”

Scott barely manages to disguise his snort of laughter with a hasty cough, earning them a few sour glances as they both turn their attention back to practice.

The session is winding to a close; all five teams have finished their individual run throughs, and there’s generic pop music blaring from the rink speakers, the kind that Tessa will catch herself humming in the shower ten days from now. Most couples are settling into their cooldowns, stroking leisurely round the rink, but Tessa knows Katia and Ilya will want to run the session down to the wire, squeeze in one last element before they stop — and sure enough, the pair give a quick nod in Tessa and Scott’s direction as they pass by the boards.

Their last element in practice is always the same, a set of three synchronised twizzles that has been their downfall all season long. She and Scott have tried to pinpoint the issue but as soon as they fix one problem, another crops up: Katia fails to catch her blade quick enough in the rotation, or Ilya hops out of his very last twizzle, or they’re simply messy and off balance, rocking back and forth on their skate blades. Just watching them set up for the element shaves a few minutes off Tessa’s lifespan every time. The most she can surmise is that it’s the first and most obvious part of their program that suffers when they’re nervous, which they clearly are today. Breakfast was taken in stony silence; Scott had tried to lighten the mood with a joke about stashing away food for when they’d rediscover their appetite after practice, but even he knew when to back off and give them space.

Coming off a difficult Grand Prix season, seventh and fourth at their two assignments, this is Katia and Ilya’s only chance to prove that they deserve to be on the Worlds team. More than that, it’s a chance to prove to all their detractors that they’re still a force to be reckoned with — that they didn’t make the biggest mistake of their career in moving to Montreal. Tessa can hardly blame them for looking a little tense as they set up for their element at the top of the rink, and she mentally crosses her fingers for a solid end to their practice session.

They swing out of their transition, check the way is clear and then: first twizzle, anti-clockwise, arms tucked in tight to their bodies, legs crossed below the knee; second set, clockwise, both of them grabbing their blade just in time, free arms raised.

They’re flying into their third set, gathering speed with their confidence, and Tessa knows they’ll have it, they’ll be just fine—

Suddenly, there’s a bark of frantic Russian, and Tessa watches as Katia’s focus breaks, her flickering across to the source of the noise — too late to do anything, as a pair in the middle of a curve lift come careening into them.

All she sees is a blur of movement, the flash of a skate blade extended out: close, _far_ too close. Her stomach lurches as Katia recoils, jumping backwards into Ilya, who turns them quickly away, his arms wrapping protectively around his partner.

“ _Shit_ ,” Scott hisses, gripping the top of the boards.

It’s impossible to tell from a distance whether anyone was hurt, but the male skater from the opposing pair straightens up, a flood of angry Russian pouring from his mouth. A quick command from his coaches has him slinking back across to the boards with his partner. He’s Aristova and Gorshkov’s, she realises, noticing the four of them conversing in low voices, a few dirty looks cast in their direction. That doesn’t surprise her in the least.

“Assholes,” Ilya spits, as he skates up to the boards. 

It’s clear they’re rattled; Katia’s jaw is clenched, her fingers tight around Ilya’s, his other hand resting at her hip as he glances back in the direction of the team who collided with them.

“Easy,” Scott says, motioning for them to come closer. “Did they get you? That looked like a close one.”

Katia shakes her head, but the clench of her jaw betrays her.

“They hit her here,” Ilya says, gesturing to Katia’s hip. Tessa can see a small rip in Katia’s practice clothing when she glances down, barely visible with the cleanness of the cut. “Those idiots, they didn’t even look first. No one to teach them manners…”

“It’s nothing,” Katia insists. “I’m fine. It is not even a scratch…”

“We’ll get it checked out as soon as you’re off the ice,” Tessa says, in a tone that brooks no argument. “Even if you feel fine, we need to make sure it’s nothing serious.”

“It’s not serious,” Katia says quickly.

“Then we should have no trouble getting a medical professional to double check. Go on, finish your cooldown and then we’ll get your hip seen to.”

Katia looks grateful for the diversion, all but dragging Ilya away and off round the rink. Tessa watches carefully, on the lookout for any sign of discomfort or pain, but Katia’s skating is as smooth and unharried, her knee bend as deep and easy as it ever is. Tessa’s brow is still furrowed by the end of the cooldown.

A general reluctance to admit injury isn’t unusual in a competitive athlete. Tessa would know that better than most; even if it’s not a sprained ankle or burning shins, there’s always a certain level of discomfort to push through during a competitive skate. Faking it for the judges is second nature. Tessa only worries that Katia seems as keen to fake it for her coaches, her partner, even herself, as she does for competition, and Tessa has to wonder again about Katia and Ilya’s coaching environment in Moscow, the childhood they spent with Aristova and Gorshkov.

Whether it was much of a childhood at all.  
  


* * *

  
Thankfully, Katia doesn’t need stitches; a disinfectant wipe and a sticking plaster fixes her up. They get no apology from the couple who collided with them, or, heaven forbid, Aristova and Gorshkov themselves. Tessa’s not sure she would even let the pair near their former students at this point in time. She still hasn’t ruled out the possibility that the whole thing was planned to rattle Katia and Ilya before their rhythm dance later this evening.

Ice dance practices have always been ruthless, a demonstration in grand-standing and intimidation tactics as much as anything else. Teams vie to take up as much space as possible, skate fast and hit hard. Accidents happen. It would be easy for a coach to instruct their team to go bigger and bolder, tell them to pay a little less mind to the couples surrounding them and expect everyone else to get out of the way, without necessarily ordering a targeted attack on the competition. Or, they could flat-out tell them to run into their rivals in the middle of their curve lift.

There’s always that.

Half of her thinks she’s being far too dramatic, caught up in the reputation of Russian ice dance drama. The other half of her remembers the look on Oksana Aristova’s face when Katia and Ilya took to the ice for practice, affected disinterest unable to hide the cold fury burning in her eyes. Tessa wouldn’t put anything past that look.

But neither Katia or Ilya mention the incident in the short walk back to their hotel, and at their request, Tessa leaves them to decompress for a few hours until the rhythm dance. She makes her way back to her room, taking the stairs rather than the lift and breathing hard by the time she lets herself in, the quiet click of the lock accompanied by the hum of the central heating as it cranks up at her presence.

With a sigh of relief, she drops her bag down by the door and leans against the wall. 

She’s managed to fight it off all morning, but in the silence of the room, the stubborn reminder of an oncoming stress headache throbs at her temples, and she grimaces. It’s barely past noon, at least four hours until they need to be back at the rink for the rhythm dance. She could probably spend the entire time reviewing video footage Patrice messaged them of their teams training back at home, or replying to the essay of an email her mother sent her the other day, outlining plans for a summer break at the cottage. There are a hundred and one productive things she could fill her free time this afternoon with — except given the chaos of the morning, she feels entitled to a little personal indulgence.

When Scott arrives back at the room forty minutes later, it’s to an empty bedroom, the bathroom door ajar, and, upon investigation, the sight of Tessa in one of her happiest places: bath full to the brim, foamy mountains of vanilla-scented bubbles piled so high that her head is barely visible, toes just peeking out on the opposite end. Her eyes are closed, oblivious to the world for all intents and purposes, but she hears him kick off his shoes in the hallway, the creak of the bathroom door opening.

“Hel-looo? Tess? You still alive in there?”

There’s a smile in his voice, a familiar fondness. This has been a habit of Tessa’s for as long as she can remember, probably as long as he can too: a full bath, bubbles piled high, worldly responsibilities soaking away. She’ll smell of vanilla for days afterwards, embalmed into her skin, her hair, underneath her fingernails. Scott always says it feels like kissing a marshmallow.

“Tess?” he prompts, after half a minute.

She gives a happy sigh, pushing herself up out of the water a little. “Mh-hmm. I’m good.”

“Just checking,” Scott chuckles. “Can’t have you melting away into your bubble bath just yet.”

“It’s feeling very appealing at the moment.”

“I bet.”

He’s still at the bathroom door, so she cracks an eye open to peer up at him. She didn’t have time to appreciate it earlier this morning, too focused on making sure they had everything together for practice, but underneath his Team Russia jacket Scott is wearing a surprisingly nice button-down shirt: a light navy fabric that fits him snugly and draws out the richness of his brown eyes, a few of the top buttons undone. He always looks good, but actually having an outfit that doesn’t make Tessa want to throw the contents of her wardrobe at him does him many favours.

He glances across to the book open on the floor next to the bath: a generic thriller she picked up at the airport for cheap and has been reading more to pass the time than anything else. “You want to be left in peace for a bit?”

“No, it’s okay,” she says. “Come sit.”

He grins. “Break my poor ass on the bathroom tiles? Don’t mind if I do.”

“It’s that or the toilet,” she says, reaching over the side of the bath to toss him the towel that she dumped on the floor to mop up the small amount of water that overflowed when she got in. “Here. Never say I don’t accommodate you.”

“You’re too good to me.”

He’s still chuckling as he settles himself down on the floor next to the bath, slightly sodden towel folded underneath him for comfort, and she flicks a few bubbles at him.

“How was the seminar?”

“Boring,” he sighs. “You know how it is with this stuff. Three times as long as it needed to be, and half as useful. The poor guy translating for me was pretty much asleep by the end of it.”

“That’s a shame. It was nice of them to give you a translator at least.”

Their presence had been requested at an officials’ seminar going over key changes to the rhythm dance rules from last season, for no real reason that Tessa could ascertain apart from maybe the fact that Scott had given a similar seminar at High Performance Camp in Canada that year. Normally they would have refused until competition was done, but after the drama of the summer, they need to take every opportunity they can to make amends with the Russian federation. Attendance at the fed's dull, textbook-heavy seminars is unfortunately non-optional.

“Yeah, you can take the next one and I’ll come soak in the tub,” Scott says, reaching over the side of the bath to scoop up a handful of bubbles. “Your hour has definitely been more productive than mine.”

“Thank you for going.”

“One of us had to,” he shrugs. “Consider the debt from the womens’ hockey game repaid at long last.” 

She’s about to joke about how it’ll take much more than an hour-long seminar to repay her for the four hours of gala practice she endured alone, on the verge of bronchitis and running on a solid thirty minutes of sleep, but there’s something in Scott’s voice that gives her pause. When she glances across to him, he’s stopped in the middle of sculpting his bubble bath into a little snowman, a pensive look on his face.

She frowns, drawing up to the side of the tub and folding her arms over the edge. “Scott? Hey. Is everything alright?”

He doesn’t respond for a good few seconds, which worries her even more — before he turns his head to quickly press a kiss to her cheek, his lips pleasantly cool against her flushed skin.

“Mm,” he mumbles. “Sorry. I’m all good.”

“Are you sure? You disappeared on me there.”

“Yeah, no, it’s not a huge deal. It’s fine.”

But his hands are all over the place — palming at the back of his neck, raking through his hair, drumming restlessly against his knee, and it doesn’t take much more than a pointed look from Tessa before he sighs, propping an elbow up on the side of the bath and leaning his head against his palm.

“I think I hate this place,” he says, as he ever-so-carefully takes the bubble bath and daubs it across the wrinkle of a concerned frown between her brows, before wiping it away with a thumb and giving her a small smile.

She knows he doesn’t mean the hotel, or the rink, or even the competition.

It’s the snide comments and the whispers hidden behind the backs of hands, the stares they attract everywhere they go, the way she knows that they will always be outsiders, her and Scott, no matter what they do here, no matter how much they prove.

The past few days have reminded her of everything she hated most about competition. She doesn’t doubt that things will have been even worse for Scott, who thrives on the cheery competitive banter back home, whose face lights up when he spots an old rival halfway across the boards at a domestic competition, who will happily stay and learn the life story of the rink volunteer who handed him his skate guards one time after stepping off the ice. He soaks up energy from being around good people the same way she soaks up energy sitting alone in the bath for half an hour. Tessa has never understood it, but it’s something that she knows indisputably to be true. 

“You’re allowed to hate places,” she says diplomatically, as he slips his hand to the side of her cheek, letting him trace his fingers across the cusp of her jaw. “Especially when those places will happily hate you back. It’s hardly an irrational feeling.”

He raises an eyebrow at her, smiling slightly. “Didn’t you used to say that hate was unproductive?”

“I’m grouchy now. Middle age has made me a scrooge.”

“You were and are _neither_ of those things, Tess.”

He’s being very sweet, so she leans forward to kiss him softly; the tension carried in the high ridge of his shoulders and the knot of his brow melts a little, and his eyes are gentler when she draws back to look at him.

“You don’t hate it here, though,” he says: statement of fact, not a question.

Tessa shrugs. “I don’t like it, but I don’t think it’s worth my time or my energy to hate. None of it is. We’re here to do the best possible job we can for our students, and that’s it. We don’t owe anything to the other coaches, or the competitors. Absolutely not the federation. So we do everything we need to — we go to their seminars, and toe their lines, and make nice conversation with their people — but ultimately, they don’t deserve any more thought than that. We’re here for Katia and Ilya. That’s who matters. Everything else is extraneous. ”

“Back in the bubble,” he says, and she nods. 

“Exactly. We know how to do this. We’re _good_ at this, Scott. You could say that’s something we’ve prepared well for, ignoring everyone else in existence.”

In the end, it has always come down to the two of them. No one else in the world looks at Scott like she does, can see all the things in him that she sees; and if that’s love or if that’s the security of having had him beside her for the better part of thirty years, all she knows is that it makes her stronger for it.

A smile tugs at the corner of his mouth. “Hey, we pay attention to _some_ people.”

The lilt of his voice tells her that he’s not taking this all too seriously any more. “Debatable,” she says, with a little shrug. “Your attention span during training was always hit or miss.”

“Well, you’re a very distracting person to be around.”

She raises her eyebrows, pushes herself away from the edge of the bath to sit up and comb her wet hair back behind her. “Sounds like a you problem.”

“Oh it does, does it?” he says, sounding amused. 

“It’s all mind over matter. Did I think you looked unbelievably attractive in your red and white striped candy-cane jacket this morning? Sure. Was I going to rip it off you five minutes before we walked out the door? I was considering it, mostly to save my retinas standing next to you for the next hour—” 

She cuts herself off with a sharp squeak of laughter as Scott lobs a handful of bubble bath at her; it falls short of the target to slip into the foamy bathwater just beyond her torso, and she stares up at Scott with a clear challenge in her eyes.

“You missed.”

He doesn’t miss the next time, or the time after, when it’s his lips that find her skin instead — and she finds that she doesn’t care so much about the sudden end to her relaxing bath time when it’s for the things that Scott has a mind to do.  
  


* * *

  
“Oh my _god_.”

“It’s _fine,_ Tess.”

“The whole room is flooded! Precisely which part of this looks _fine_ to you?! There is water dripping through the floorboards _right_ now, and we have to be downstairs ready to leave in thirty minutes. God, I _knew_ this was a bad idea.”

“Just tell them the bath leaked when you were running it. They won’t be able to tell the difference anyway, why does it matter?”

“There is bathwater on the ceiling, Scott. The. Ceiling.”

“I know. It’s pretty impressive, eh?”

“Don’t just stand there pulling faces at me! Take a towel and make yourself useful.”

“You thought I was very _useful_ ten minutes— alright, alright, taking a towel…”  
  


* * *

  
The rhythm dance is, to put it bluntly, a disaster.

Ilya falls on his twizzle at the exact same spot as their practice accident, and it’s the opening the judges are looking for to bury them going into the free. They manage to rally somewhat, clawing their way up to a fourth place finish overall, but their disappointment is plain as day in the Kiss and Cry when the results come through. 

Tessa knows that to them, it doesn’t matter that they’ve just put out their first clean free of the season, or that the crowd cheered harder for them than they did for the six previous teams combined. All they see is the little number that pops up beside their score on the video monitor. Fourth place won’t be enough to send them to Worlds, not with their hit-and-miss Grand Prix season, won’t silence their critics, and certainly won’t put a dampener on the little loop of self-criticism that she has no doubt is circling in their heads.

She does her best to remind them that they’ve done incredibly well to come back from the rhythm dance; in the grand scheme of things they have plenty more seasons to go, plenty more chances at making the Worlds team. But she knows what making the team means to them, this season more so than any. She can’t fault them for looking a little weary of the platitudes.

Even twenty-four hours later, the two of them struggle to muster smiles as they wait in the hotel lobby, cases packed, for the arrival of a taxi to take them to their respective destinations: Katia to her mother’s place in the suburbs of St Petersburg, Ilya to the train station and from there, onto Moscow. They’ve arranged two weeks off for Christmas, the first real time they’ll spend at home since moving to Canada, and Ilya is in the middle of attempting to explain his family’s traditional Christmas celebrations to Scott via a mixture of Russian and English and some complex hand gestures. From what Tessa can gather, it seems to involve a lot of vodka-soaked pudding and a fiercely competitive game of cards, but she’s not paying too much attention. 

She’s much more concerned with Katia, who has tucked herself up on the very end of the sofa by the large front windows of the lobby, chin in hand as she stares out into the driving snow. Her light auburn hair has been scraped up into a ponytail, exposing the severe ridge of her cheekbones and a pensive look in her pale eyes. Katia is solemn at the best of times, but there’s something more than solemnity there today. Tessa doesn’t miss, either, the quick little glances that Ilya keeps making in the direction of his partner, attention flickering nervously back and forth between Katia in the corner and his captive audience in Scott. She wonders precisely what happened this morning before the pair were hurried off to a day of press interviews and sponsorship junkets.

She and Scott have been coaching Katia and Ilya for almost six months now, and yet there are still things about Katia in particular that seem utterly inaccessible. The only place she ever seems to be truly at ease is on the ice or with Ilya. The latter, at least, Tessa thinks she’s uniquely placed to understand. Ilya raises his voice, getting particularly emphatic about a certain point he’s trying to make to Scott, and Tessa watches Katia glance over, her eyebrows lifting slightly in amusement, the stern look on her face softening into fond incredulity.

Tessa’s not so blind as to miss seeing something a little familiar there.

Wandering over in Katia’s direction, she takes a seat on the sofa. “He seems very excited to go back home.”

Katia folds her arms across her chest. “Hmph. Two weeks eating his mother’s _pirogi_ and putting his feet up. It will be the most exciting two weeks of his year. No question.”

“Not for you too? You must be looking forward to seeing your family again.”

Katia pauses. There’s a brief flicker of a frown, a slight raise of her shoulders that could be a shrug if Tessa squinted. “Of course,” she says. “I miss them very much.”

It’s not convincing in the slightest.

“I can imagine. It’s just you and your mom at home, right? Your brother is…”

“New Zealand,” Katia nods. “Not home. He is working… busy, all the time.”

Both Katia’s brother and her mother appear to be busy, all the time, if their lack of attendance at the past week’s competition has been any indication. Her brother in New Zealand gets a pass, but Katia’s mother lives barely half an hour’s drive away in St Petersburg. Her absence was made all the more glaring by the presence of Ilya’s entire family: parents, grandparents, and three older sisters, travelling all the way from Moscow.

Tessa knows a little about Katia’s family situation from her try-out interview back in the summer, but not much. Her mother had been a professional skater, her father never part of the picture. Katia had moved to Moscow with her mother when she was ten years old, joined Aristova and Gorshkov’s school, met Ilya, and never moved again. 

Most athletes are lucky if they can count on one hand the number of coaches they’ve gone through. Katia has known constancy her entire life: her mother, ever-present; her father, never there to begin with; Ilya holding her hand since she was old enough to know what that meant, and the same two coaches guiding her career from cradle to adulthood.

Tessa wonders if she could even begin to grapple with the kind of change that Katia is facing at the moment.

“Does he ever get home?” she says. “Your brother, I mean.”

“Sometimes. Once, twice a year, maybe. He always would try to come home to Russia for my birthday but that…” She seems to falter, lose her way in her thoughts for a moment, before collecting herself. “That is not a problem now. It’s good. When I don’t see him, I don’t miss him so much.”

“How long has it been?”

“Nine months? Ten, I think?”

There’s something about the subject that makes Katia clearly uncomfortable, her body pulled tight in on itself, shoulders shrugged together, hands slipped into the pockets of her leather jacket, so Tessa doesn’t push it. If Katia wants a free therapy session, she’ll come asking for one.

From across the hotel lobby, Scott lets out a cackle of laughter; Tessa glances across to see Ilya’s eyes light up, the two of them still deep in conversation.

“It’ll be good for you both to have a break,” Tessa says, quietly, watching them. “The two of you deserve to have a few weeks at home after all the work you’ve put in so far this season. You can come back in the New Year fighting fit. We might even be able to make a start on next year’s programs, depending on how assignments go.”

Katia nods eagerly, evidently relieved by the change of subject. “I’ll work hard. I will, I promise.”

“I know you will. If anything, you work _too_ hard.”

“No such thing,” Katia declares, with the barest hint of a smile as Tessa turns to raise an eyebrow at her.

“I think we need to start ordering you two to have more fun in the rink. Scott has a few ideas already.”

“...Ideas?”

“Oh, he said something about switching up partners on a Friday morning, letting you skate with Gabriel for a bit, and Ilya with Natalie. He thinks it’d be good for you all. You could practice your pattern together. It might help you relax a little.”

Katia’s eyes widen, then narrow. “You are pulling my leg,” she says, flatly.

“I’m not. It’s true, go ahead and ask him yourself.”

Katia glances to Tessa, then across to Scott, evidently deliberating how likely it is that Tessa is pulling this completely out of her ass. 

“Go on,” Tessa says, raising her eyebrows in Scott’s direction. 

It’s a testament to the fact that her poker face has improved leaps and bounds that Katia actually believes her, getting to her feet and making her way across the lobby to Scott.

“Scott? Is it true that you will make us skate with other partners on Friday?”

Scott turns to her with a casual smile. “Oh yeah. For sure. We were actually thinking of extending it longer if it worked. Get you guys to partner each other for a whole week and see who clicked better by the end of it. You never appreciate what you’ve got until it’s gone, right?”

The reply rolls off his tongue like he’s practiced it a hundred times in the mirror, and for a second even Tessa wonders if she forgot the conversation where they did actually discuss a legitimate partner swap. It’s certainly convincing enough for Katia, whose expression turns from narrow-eyed suspicion to dawning horror as she stands there, arms folded across her chest, staring.

“It’s just a one-off thing,” Scott says. “Unless you get _too_ comfortable together, maybe we’ll make it more regular.”

Katia looks aghast. “What? No.”

“You never know, it could be good for you. Tess used to partner Charlie in warm-ups all the time, eh, T?”

She’s just about managed to keep a straight face this entire time, but it’s the thought of Marina ever making them switch partners with Meryl and Charlie that breaks her. The first and last time they switched partners for a warm-up, Scott wore an expression like struck thunder the entire time, so focused on watching Tessa and her temporary partner as they stroked awkwardly round the rink that he almost crashed his poor partner into the boards. Marina swiftly banned them from skating with anyone else in the interests of rink safety.

At the sound of Tessa’s muffled laughter, Katia’s head whips around. Her eyes go wide, and she flushes almost as bright as her auburn hair.

“You — you are _liars_.” 

“Uh-oh,” Scott mutters.

“Katia, we would never in a million years force you to skate with someone you didn’t want to,” Tessa smiles, a little endeared by Katia’s blind trust in them. They’ll probably never have it again, but it was nice while it lasted. “I promise you that. Of course you’ll still be skating with Ilya.” 

Ilya rushes forwards to throw his arms around his partner. “She loves me, she really loves me!” he grins.

“Get off me,” Katia grumbles, but there’s a reluctant smile that twitches at the corners of her mouth too, and she mutters something quickly in Russian that only makes Ilya’s grin widen.

Tessa will take it as a positive step in the right direction that Katia doesn’t look like she wants to murder everyone in the hotel lobby as she stands there, Ilya’s arms squashed around her immobile form — and by the time the taxi arrives, she’s been drawn into conversation at the centre of the room, her previous perch at the window seat left only to her luggage.

Her contributions may be limited to rolling her eyes at Ilya and correcting him on the particulars of how they used to celebrate Christmas at their rink in Moscow, but she looks happier than Tessa has seen all week.  
  


* * *

  
When Tessa had brought up the idea of she and Scott staying in St Petersburg over Christmas rather than spending their whole Christmas Eve (and most of Christmas Day) on a transatlantic flight back to Canada, she had been picturing something small and intimate. A long weekend in a top-floor city apartment overlooking the Mariinsky Theatre, the sights of the city on their doorstep, or a little townhouse off the beaten track, tucked away where the clamour of traffic and tourists faded, and the rows of identikit souvenir shops gave way to something real.

What she gets instead is the Presidential Suite in the Belmond Grand Hotel. 

And, well — she can hardly say she’s _disappointed_.

Their suite boasts a full six rooms that she and Scott can barely hope to make use of: two separate king-sized beds with magnificent draperies and rich silks hanging across their four posters; a master bathroom carved entirely from polished marble, complete with Grecian columns bracketing the doorway; a velvet pull-cord for dedicated twenty-four hour room service; a grand piano sitting in a circular anteroom surrounded floor-to-ceiling with large gilded windows, the delicate gold carving around the window frames so intricate that Tessa could lose hours of her life trying to decipher it all. Neither of them can play piano, but she’ll give a good go of bashing out Chopsticks on an instrument that probably costs three times as much as their house. 

By the time their personal concierge has seen them up to their rooms and run them through the dizzying list of perks available to them as Presidential Suite occupants (free spa treatments, a personal chef, fast-pass tickets to the Winter Palace, et cetera) before finally leaving them alone to settle into the room, Tessa’s head is spinning.

She and Scott spent last Christmas in the rink until nine p.m, at which point Scott had coaxed her back to his place for a celebration composed of the trimmings of a microwave turkey, and a crumpled Christmas hat fashioned out of old seminar notes that Scott had lying around his house. It was a lovely Christmas, as exhausted as they were from the day of coaching. But there’s going one step further, and then there’s shooting straight off the staircase and into intergalactic orbit.

She stands in the middle of the living room, slightly dazed, as Scott flits from room to room like an excited kid.

“D’you think the art’s original?” he calls. “It must be, you can see the brush strokes on this one. That’s crazy, eh? Not even a glass frame on it or anything. They must trust us to not trash the whole place.”

Tessa doesn’t think she wants to know how much the pieces of art on the wall cost; they all look equally and terrifyingly expensive, like if she breathes too hard on one of them a seven-figure bill will appear in front of them when they come to check out.

Scott continues his itemised exploration of the suite for a few minutes longer, before he appears again from around a doorframe with a grin on his face.

“This is crazy, right? It’s not just me? This is, like, genuinely crazy?”

She raises her eyebrows at him. “Scott, _you_ booked this place.”

“Yeah, but you know… I didn’t think it would be like — _this_ ,” he says, gesturing to a portrait on the wall of a stern-looking Russian statesman in full military uniform. “It all looked more normal in the photos.”

“Funny how these things happen when you pick a room called the Presidential Suite.”

“I’ve been saving for a rainy day,” he chirps.

“I thought that was the house?”

“That was from the other rainy day fund.”

“Oh, _obviously_ ,” she says, rolling her eyes at him, but she’s smiling by the time he catches her around the waist and pulls her close.

He sways them from side to side, one hand settling at her hip and the other at her back, and she lets herself relax into the motion of it, closing her eyes to settle her chin against his shoulder.

The suite is a little much, even for her. She feels out of place amongst the obvious wealth of the decor, a lifestyle that she’s never really aspired to beyond the occasional luxuries with clothes or her house. But it’s nicer with Scott, the discomfort easing as she leans into him and lets him move them gently across the floor.

She’s never needed music to know how to dance with Scott; she can hear the waltz in the quiet shuffling of his shoes across the floorboard, the slow, easy press of his hand across the flat of her back, the steady rush of his pulse under her fingertips when her hand curls around the side of his neck. The echoes of a hundred thousand hours of training are settled into every fibre of her being. Her body knows how to move with his, just as it knows how to breathe and to be.

She reminds herself of that during the times they occasionally brush up against one another, rattled by a tired, thoughtless word or a small frustration from a week of coaching. If she ever needs proof of how fiercely they have fought for one another, how tirelessly they have worked, it’s there in her own body: the way she has moulded it to his, and his to hers.

“I’m taking your stunned silence as a good thing,” he says, lowering his head to rest gently against hers. “Either that or you’re trying to figure out how to tell me nicely that this place is the ugliest thing you’ve ever seen in your entire life.”

She gives a short laugh, pretending to consider the matter as he spins them slowly.

“The bathroom _is_ personally offensive to me...”

“Thank god, because I was thinking it was gonna be a deal-breaker if you wanted to bring the marble pillars back home.”

“...and I’m not convinced by the gold cherubs on top of all the curtain poles…”

“Very fair.”

“...but apart from that…”

“You’ll accept the _heavy_ burden of a luxury hotel suite? T, you’re too kind, please.”

Tessa hides her smile in the crook of his neck.

“I think you need to work on your sweet-talking,” she tells him. “It was all going so well for you five minutes ago.”

“I don’t know, my partner’s a pretty accommodating sort. I don’t think she minds too much. Or half as much as she pretends to, anyway.”

“You’re very confident about what your partner may or may not mind.”

His hands slip up to her waist, thumbs sliding under the hem of her shirt.

“I’ve had a little bit of experience,” he says. “I think I can figure it out.”

He leans over her, pressing his mouth to the corner of her jaw, down her neck, chasing the flush across her collarbones. He’s not slow tonight, doesn’t kiss her sweetly and softly like he usually does at first, and she knows that he’s itching to relieve the stress of the week just gone, to lose himself in the pursuit of her pleasure as soon as she’ll let him.

She slips a hand up to the back of his neck, brushes her fingers through the curling strands of his hair, getting long enough now for her to fist into her knuckles. “Show me.”

It’s all the permission he needs.

His teeth nip against the ridge of her clavicle, hard enough that Tessa knows there’ll be a mark there tomorrow, at the same time he pushes his hand down below the waistband of her jeans, and he gets to demonstrating _exactly_ what he’s learned that she likes.  
  


* * *

  
As tempting as it is to spend all three days of their Christmas break making full use of the facilities available to them at the Belmond (and it is so very tempting that even Scott has trouble dragging himself out of bed the morning after their extensive exploration of the suite’s capabilities, grumbling something unintelligible at her and throwing his arm across her torso when she dares to try and remove herself from their warm tangle of limbs), Tessa intends to see the outside world once or twice. 

It’s their first time in St Petersburg, competition never taking them anywhere in Russia but Moscow before, and Tessa has a jam-packed schedule planned to tick off everything she’s wanted to see.

Every half hour of the next two days is accounted for, travel routes precisely plotted and their itinerary full to bursting. It’s like a game to her, swapping and changing activities to maximise the number of sights they can see. She’s well aware, however, that Scott does not share this point of view and is showing extreme generosity in letting her plan their time here, all but committing himself to forty-eight hours route marching through museums and state palaces. So after she’s scheduled in the main sights: the Winter Palace, State Hermitage Museum, Catherine Palace, St Isaac’s Cathedral, and a handful of other carefully selected museums, she makes sure to include the Museum of Russian Vodka at the end of the first day.

Mostly for Scott, but a little bit for her too.

“It’s only ranked number 167 of things to do in St Petersburg,” she warns him as they approach the building, hurrying through the snow that was lovely and picturesque half an hour ago, but has quickly turned to biting cold, funnelled into their faces down the long, high-walled city streets. “I don’t want you to get your hopes up too much.”

He only grins as he pushes open the door for her. “We’re about to drink vodka in the heart of the motherland, Tess. As long as they don’t poison it, I think we’ll be good.”

They don’t poison it, but Tessa wonders what else the museum puts into their free samples.

What begins as a forty-minute educational tour covering the intricacies of vodka distillation and the three different types of vodka produced in St Petersburg quickly escalates to four hours spent sampling the museum bar’s entire selection of drinks, before the amused bartender recommends them a few places down the street to continue their evening, and Scott convinces her that they can hardly call it a trip to Russia if they don’t sample _everything_ on offer to them, can they?

Tessa drinks things in that series of dingy, hole-in-the-wall bars that she can’t even name, doubts the name exists in English anyway. Scott keeps going up to the bar and coming back with little shot glasses full of alarmingly colourless liquid, which means that _she_ has to go up to fetch something to chase Scott’s paint stripper down with, and at some point she vaguely remembers the patrons of one bar buying her and Scott a round of something absolutely lethal too, entertained by the antics of a pair of foreigners determined to drink themselves under the table.

In her usual buzzed logic, it had all seemed like such a good idea at the time.

Waking up on Christmas morning, hungover as fuck on premium and not-so-premium Russian vodka, and many, many other things that she can feel swilling around unhappily in her stomach, she is filled only with regret.

Her head feels like it’s being slowly and methodically split open with a chainsaw. Her tongue is thick as sandpaper in her mouth, and there’s a faint curl of nausea clenching around her innards, making her feel alarmingly unsteady. It’s still there when she sits up, breathing thinly through her nose, and she grits her teeth.

She hasn’t thrown up from drinking since she was sixteen years old. She refuses to throw up now, in the fanciest hotel room she has ever stayed in, on Christmas Day of all days.

But it’s a touch and go thing, so she staggers her way to the obnoxious marble bathroom, and sits next to the toilet with her head between her knees for a good half an hour, which is where Scott finds her when he wanders through a little later.

She doesn’t even have the strength to look up at him as he enters, only croaks a quiet “Merry Christmas,” as he slides down the wall to sit next to her in silence.

They both take a minute to consider their collective life choices. 

“I’m, uh— I’m really glad we’ve done that once, so we can never do it again,” Scott husks, his voice barely more than a crackling whisper.

“Likewise.”

She presses her cheek to the marble tiled wall, discovering that the cool surface leeches away some of the flushed, prickling heat of her skin. She decides she doesn’t hate the marble bathroom quite as much as she thought she did.

“We cannot _ever_ tell our parents about this,” she mumbles, closing her eyes, and she hears Scott make a noise of agreement. “As far as your mom or my mom are aware, we had a lovely time in St Petersburg. We saw the sights, had a romantic dinner on Christmas Eve…”

“Woke up bright and early on Christmas morning full of love in our hearts and joy in our souls—”

“Precisely.”

Scott gives a short, rattling chuckle that sounds a little bit like the breath might be leaving his body at that very instant. 

“This would be a bad time to remind you that we have the ballet matinee this afternoon, wouldn’t it?” she says.

Scott is silent for a long moment, before he promptly crawls over to the toilet bowl and throws up.

“Cool,” she mumbles. “Just checking.”  
  


* * *

  
The rink is quieter over the first few weeks of the new year, the tension of the post-Grand Prix season faded somewhat now that Nationals are over and assignments are finalised. 

They’ll be taking three teams to Worlds this season: Natalie and Gabriel, who qualified in top position for Senior Worlds after a clear victory at the Grand Prix Final; Niamh and Joe, securing their expected junior assignment for Great Britain; and, the pair that Tessa is most pleased for (although, much like having a favourite child, she will never admit it), Reece and Nolan, who pulled it out of the bag at Canadian Nationals to earn a bronze medal and their first trip to Junior Worlds.

It’s disappointing for their other two teams, but neither of them are taking it too hard. With the current strength of Canadian junior ice dance, Maia and Tim were never really expecting to get an assignment, and Katia and Ilya came back refreshed and ready to work after their two weeks home in Russia.

Tessa had wondered, briefly and a little selfishly, if letting the pair go home for an extended period of time would only make their homesickness worse on return, so it’s a relief to see them more motivated and engaged than ever. Katia in particular has seemed more settled since, joining in with the buzz of rink conversation where previously she would keep to herself, and even once or twice hopping onto the ice with one of the junior teams to help demonstrate. She and Ilya have a few senior B competitions left on their schedule to see out the end of the season, and Tessa is already thinking ahead to the summer, where this time they’ll have the luxury of a full off-season to work on choreography and technical elements.

But for now, in the post-Christmas lull, it’s nice to be able to ease off on the pressure. None of their teams have been assigned to Europeans, leaving a good four or five weeks of uninterrupted coaching time before Four Continents in early February, and the general mood around the rink is that of a held breath finally exhaled. Skaters and coaches alike still work hard — the aches and pains Tessa wakes up with every morning can attest to that — but there’s an unhurried, patient sense to the daily grind of training.

There’s even time to trawl through the backlog of about three thousand emails on the school’s business address and arrange a couple of media visits. Ninety percent of the requests are reporters wanting to interview Natalie and Gabriel or Katia and Ilya, but one or two are looking to cover the school as a whole, and it’s the latter that are extended an invitation for a few days in late January. 

She and Scott had been hesitant earlier in the season about letting people into the rink, not wanting anything to distract from training, but now Tessa wonders if she shouldn’t have invited press along as soon as they came knocking. The kids always know when they’re being filmed, and they seem to thrive on the attention — the younger teams especially, for whom a camera crew is still a relatively new and exciting prospect.

The first day is spent filming coaching sessions, before moving onto interviews the next. Teams are pulled up into the stands one by one to film; Tessa watches them all out of the corner of her eye when she’s on the ice coaching, takes note of the fact that the longest interviews of the day are naturally given to Natalie and Gabriel and Katia and Ilya, but even Maia and Tim get a good half-hour up in the stands too. The pair had been over the moon about the prospect of their first proper interview, bombarding Tessa all through their coaching session with practice answers to questions that she never even asked. (She had found it endearing until forty minutes in, at which point she made them run their pattern three times over to shut them up.)

But it’s at the very end of the second day, when the interview filming is winding down and the rink is beginning to quieten, that Scott reminds her there’s one last thing the camera crew need to get on film.

To the rest of the skating school, it’s no secret that if you hang around long enough after coaching sessions have finished for the day, sitting _extremely_ quietly in the stands, you might be lucky enough to catch a glimpse of Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir’s private skates. There’s not as much time for it as there used to be, back when they only had one team to coach and one Olympic dream to worry about, but they still try to make a habit of it at least once a week — and more often than not, there’s a silent spectator or two hidden up in the stands, watching eagerly.

(More often than not, it’s Maia.)

Tessa doesn’t mind the kids hanging around to watch them. She and Scott have been practicing with a few specific pieces of music recently, trying to pull something resembling a program together, mostly just for fun, to see if they still can, and to give Tessa an excuse to choreograph free of competitive restrictions. But she’s not so sure about sharing it with the world.

For as long as Tessa can remember, she and Scott have had an unspoken agreement that their time together is their own. Anything was fair game at competition, and training sessions at the rink could be filmed and broadcast for whatever CBC had in mind, but their private time — quick trips into London for brunch at Tessa’s favourite overpriced café, or the beer league hockey games in crummy local rinks that Scott would drag her along to, reluctantly at first, before she got way too invested — none of that was for anyone to know about but the two of them.

Without ever making a conscious choice, their regular private skates have fallen into that same category too. They’ve brought it up a few times in interviews, mentioned in passing that they practice their favourite patterns and old routines, but there’s something about the idea of their skate being filmed, committed to physical evidence, that seems permanent in a way that Tessa isn’t entirely comfortable with. 

She still ends up at center ice with Scott late that afternoon, the rink dark around them like the amphitheatre of a great stage, red camera light blinking from behind the boards. 

It’s a compromise: a thirty minute Saturday morning slot on CBC Sports in return for footage of one of their practice sessions to cut into the promotional material. She’d feel worse about it if she wasn’t doing it for their kids to get some airtime (and if she hadn’t been assured by the production team that the footage won’t be used to make a bigger deal out of her and Scott than of the students they’re supposed to be promoting.) She hadn’t asked much beyond that. She doesn’t want to know, in truth, doesn’t want any distraction to pull her out of the moment with Scott when she skates.

The shadows afford her a measure of security. Soft shafts of fading light trickle in through the high windows at the side of the rink, vaulting across the surface of the ice and leaving the stands in darkness. In the sweeping shadow, Tessa can ignore the scattered crew at the boards, skip her gaze across the beady red eye of the camera to land and fasten upon Scott.

He looks considerably more relaxed than she does, which makes her wonder if she’s overreacting. They _have_ been more laissez-faire with the publicity of their relationship ever since the Bluejays game at New Year’s, when the Kiss Cam neatly solved their discussions about how, when, and if they were ever going to officially come out as a couple, or if anybody would even care by this point. But everything seems different on the ice. There’s nothing to hide away here; fundamentally, this is who she and Scott are. This is what brought them together, the years spent circling round a sixty metre patch of ice in rusty old sports centres that never saw the sun, and for a long while, this is what kept them together.

On the ice, she’s never known how to be anything but honest; and therein lies the worry.

“Just imagine they’re all naked,” Scott mutters under his breath, as they stroke around the rink together, slowly warming up muscles stiff from a day spent behind the boards. “Actually, scratch that. Imagine me naked instead.”

She doesn’t know whether the camera crew were looking for footage of Scott waggling his eyebrows lewdly at her, but it’s what they get. 

When she doesn’t respond, he gives her hand a quick squeeze. “It’ll be fine. Don’t stress. If it doesn’t turn out right, it doesn’t go to air. Simple as that.”

“I think the contract sitting in my email outbox would disagree.”

“Well, sure, maybe _technically_ … but if I fall in every shot, they can hardly use it for their promo, can they? Tell you what, give me a code word. Something we’ll use when you want me to fall over and mess up a take, so it can’t be broadcast. Like, uh—”

“Fall. SOS. Code red.”

Scott gives her a distinctly unimpressed look.

“Everyone’s a critic,” she grumbles, with a shrug. “I don’t know. I’m not good at coming up with things on the spot. Down. Heel. Sit. Stay.”

His eyes widen slightly, a grin pulling at the corners of his mouth, and she rolls her eyes, knowing exactly the path his mind has taken without him uttering a word.

“ _Oo-_ kay. How about _no_ code word, and we don’t make life twice as difficult for the camera crew, and we just do our jobs and skate?”

There’s a brief crackle of static as the rink sound system shudders to life. Around them Tessa can hear the shuffling of feet, the crew readying themselves in preparation for the start of the music.

“Boring,” Scott mouths to her, as they pick up speed and he shifts to grip her hand more securely; his thumb hooks around hers in the way that it seems designed to do, and Tessa thinks briefly about the producers sat behind the boards, camera zooming in on their interlocked fingers.

They didn’t hug before they took the ice, and maybe they should have, even though they don’t really make a habit of it any more unless they’re at competition. There’s no need to calm nerves when it’s just the two of them in the rink, when she can feel his energy just by taking his hand, feel it humming under his skin and in the ease of his smile.

Five Olympic medals and thirty years later, and she still feels self-conscious when she steps onto the ice for the first time.

“Breathe,” Scott mutters into her ear, using the excuse of switching sides to pat her quickly on the hips, before they slip into their familiar warmup, stroking exercises performed hand in hand, and then onto their practice session as the music begins to play.

Five Olympic medals and thirty years later, and she has no idea how she would have kept going without him there to kick her ass into a stubborn appreciation of her own self-worth.

_Breathe_ , he tells her, and she lets the slow fear melt out of her with each step; exhales the doubt and the nerves and the slow, sluggish inertia; inhales crisp rink air, the beat of the music that she knows backwards and with her eyes closed, the warmth of his hand tucked between them.

They have code words aplenty, one for every colour under the sun.

The opening of their program is delicate and deft: mirrored, slow curves of movement that start at the rink perimeter and bring them gradually closer to one another. They’re deliberate, purposeful, eyes fixed on one another from across the rink, and she mouths _slowly_ , knowing that Scott has a tendency to rush through their first steps in his eagerness to reach her.

They don’t say anything when they’re closer — so close that she could reach out and trail her fingertips along the side of his jaw if she wanted, only they’re closer still, until there barely seems to be a breath of air left between them.

In the second before they collide, it’s _wait_ —

And then so many words that they would tumble from her lips without a thought.

_Steady_ when they drop into a spin, her head tucked tight against his chest, arm arched against the centrifugal force; _gentle_ for the curve of their step sequence, every push of his blade followed by hers, smooth and seamless. More words that she doesn’t say, but she sees in the flash of his brown eyes when he whips past her, her gaze catching nothing but the focused furl of his brow, feeling nothing but a hand smooth at her waist, yet knowing that he’ll be there in a heartbeat when she needs him, his presence turned from formless fluidity to the roots that keep her safe when she leaps. 

There’s _hold_ when she’s stretching up at the apex of a lift, his hands holding fast at her ankles, and she remembers to linger in the position for longer than the split second their competitive programs would have allowed, to enjoy the swell of the music and the faint breath of a breeze at the back of her neck.

_Beautiful_ is when they’re knelt over one another at centre ice in their finishing pose, the curved spread of his shoulders pressing up against her spine; and she forgets that they’re both hopelessly out of breath, cheeks flushed with exertion, forgets that a week ago she was toying with throwing the whole ending away and re-choreographing the last thirty seconds.

He’s right. He can’t see her when he says it, but she knows it’s true anyway.

The eye of the camera will capture them honestly, in the fading, ochre-gold light of the afternoon, her body held in precise stillness, arched across his back, her fingertips trailing to the ice like the wind-split branches of a willow. Around her thigh and across her stomach, his hands will look like a hymn, raised in supplication and in strength. He will bear an entire world across his shoulders, and it will still be the most welcome burden they have ever shared.

They’re beautiful together. That’s something she has always been able to see clearly, even when she couldn’t believe it by herself.  
  


* * *

  
She thinks, more often now than she used to, about family.

It’s hard not to, being back in Canada and coming face to face with people she’s pushed away for years. Paris made things easier — she could hide across a continent, provide reasonable excuses about the pointlessness of flying across the globe for a weekend at home, the cost of flights, her jam-packed schedule. Now she realises how selfish those excuses were to begin with.

She’s been fortunate enough to fit into so many families: hers, Scott’s, Marie-France and Patrice’s, their own ragtag bunch at the rink. Her life feels steady in a way that would have been constricting to the Tessa of a few years ago — and that’s really the only measure she has on her own growth, so stuck in the slow shift of it that she can’t measure day by day, month by month. She has a house that she lives in for longer than a weekend, and she has a rink that she sees for ninety percent of her waking hours, and she has a partner whom she loves dearly, and none of those things scare her any more.

What scares her now is the open possibility of their next six months, twelve months, three years, five years, and the things she finds herself wanting in the luxury of that space. Things that she has never before in her life wanted, or even _worried_ about wanting.

Things, namely, that might be children.

Little dark-haired, brown-eyed toddlers that have been running around her brain as of late like an army of preschoolers hopped up on a sugar high, regardless of whether she gave them _any_ permission to be there in the first place.

Kids used to occupy the same space in her brain as a beer with friends on a Friday evening, or weekends off from work: things that, during her competitive career, she wasn’t allowed to have, ever — so it became easier to just not think about them at all. 

Sure, maybe she got a little wistful once or twice, scrolling through the Facebook profiles of her old high school classmates late on a Sunday evening, seeing their photo walls full of rosy-cheeked, smiling babies, first birthday parties and coordinated Halloween outfits. It was fun to think of the life she could have had, a life like that, normal in every sense — particularly fun on Sunday, with the prospect of a new training week looming over her. But it was clear to her that she didn’t actually _want_ kids. She liked having her own life too much; she liked having her own time, a career that wasn’t tied down to a baby or a spouse; and, a little selfishly, she liked having a body that felt like hers. Besides, the idea of having kids with any one of her off-and-on boyfriends made her skin crawl.

Scott’s serial monogamy was always more of a concern. They’d had enough awkward, half-finished discussions about taking the necessary precautions to know that yes, he wanted kids, and yes, it was something he was serious about, and no, of _course_ he wouldn’t be stupid enough to do anything to endanger their career while they were still competing. Tessa’s side of the conversation was easier — the way her nose wrinkled up and her brows knitted together at the mere question was always enough to convince Scott that she was taking _all_ the protection she could get.

He wanted kids, and she didn’t, and that was just another way in which their lives would never be compatible outside the rink.

One settled relationship, newly renovated home and a career change later, Tessa’s not so certain where they stand. They haven’t discussed it amidst everything else that’s been going on — and to be truthful, she’s not sure if there’s anything to discuss, really. 

Is it something that she wants?

She doesn’t know when her vague considerations of tiny dark-haired babies with Scott’s eyes and her freckles become less of an idle fantasy, something that pops into her head every so often when she’s waiting in line at the grocery store, and more of a concrete desire.

It could be hormones, or the sudden realisation that she’s edging closer to forty than she’s entirely ready for. Some days it could just be the grin on Scott’s face when he tells a particularly awful joke, or the warm, full-hearted feeling she gets when she thinks about the day they spent with his niece back in summer, catching a glimpse of what one version of their future could be. Maybe it’s the _idea_ of having a family rather than the family itself — but she dismisses that one quickly, knows that there are plenty of other options if all she wanted was to feel part of something for a few hours. 

Maybe there’s a tiny part of her that’s always been determined to be different, that’s fought against the notion of a typical childhood and a typical career and a nice, stable job with a nice house, happily married with kids — all the things that she used to look down on at the same time as she wondered what it would be like to have them.

Maybe it’s the slow realisation that it’s not shameful to want the simpler things in life, that a goal isn’t devalued just because it’s shared by millions of others.

It’s not an Olympic gold medal, and it won’t mean she’s the best in the world — but isn’t it enough sometimes to simply want to be happy, and for Scott to be happy, to accept that both of those things mean something very different to what they meant ten years ago?  
  


* * *

  
They drink a lot the weekend before they leave for Worlds, and she almost tells him then. 

It’s easier when they’re both a little tipsy — the words don’t seem quite so frightening in her head, the weight of them not locking up her jaw and making her trip over her train of thought.

He’s laughing as she’s pushing him backwards up the stairs, her lipstick already stained across his mouth and the collar of his shirt, purple like a bruise, his belt undone and hanging loosely from the loops after she palmed him in the front seat of the car after their dinner reservation.

They’re more than tipsy — they’re drunk, pleasantly, and she feels the courage of it buzzing under her skin. Scott stumbles clumsily upstairs, step by step, out of breath and grasping for her waist by the time he reaches the top, and she thinks about saying it then. When they’re both breathless and laughing, just kissing him and whispering it into his mouth, something that he doesn’t have to do a thing with — where he can swallow her words and never hear them again.

But the nerve leaves her, so instead she backs him up against the wall and sinks to her knees, chooses the easy way out with her mouth and her open palm.

She could say it.

She knows how she would want to say it, knows how she should say it. She’s rehearsed it in her head a thousand times already. She knows how she wants her voice to sound, not a break nor a waver, and she knows _why_ she wants to say it.

She just can’t.

Every time she tries she runs up against a mental block, until she’s pretty sure that Scott must think she’s either certifiably insane or has an unholy amount of pent-up stress to relieve given the number of times she’s resorted to sex to bail out her failed conversation attempts. (The latter, at least, she can blame on the pressure of the upcoming World Championships.)

The problem is that, logically, she knows that this is something Scott has always wanted.

He’s wanted kids of his own as soon as he was old enough to know what being a father meant, more once he truly understood it. Tessa has seen the way his eyes light up around his nieces and nephews, has sat through phone calls with him talking endlessly about his family’s newest arrival. She’d waited, feigned aggressive disinterest in every one of his relationships post-retirement, knowing that it would come sooner or later — the day he’d finally announce he was settling down and having a kid, and they’d have to stop fucking around with whatever the hell they were doing on tour for six months of the year. But there’s a difference between knowing things to be true — Scott wants kids, and Scott wants her — and being able to reconcile them into a happy medium.

Because if she asks, and he says no, then where does that leave them? 

It won’t be that he doesn’t want kids, it’ll be that he doesn’t want kids with her, specifically.

And as much as she knows that a life with only the two of them could be just as fulfilled as a life with more, she’s not so sure she could make her peace with the idea that she wasn’t enough for him, that there were things they both wanted out of their relationship that he just couldn’t see in her. 

So she keeps it to herself, when Jordan texts her cute baby photos from when they were both younger (accompanied by such inspiring captions as ‘ _Tess, how did you have such a MASSIVE HEAD when you were a baby holy shit’_ ).

She bites her tongue when Niamh brings her eight-month old nephew into the rink one Saturday afternoon, when they’re all exhausted from a week of coaching and looking for an excuse to take a breather, and Scott scoops him up as quick as anything, zooming around the rink with the kid, trailing his feet low to the ground. His smile is the widest Tessa has seen all day when the little kid shrieks in excitement.

(She won’t notice the way Scott looks at her afterwards, when the kid is tuckered out, fast asleep on her hip — his chubby, rosy cheek pressed to her shoulder, wisps of blonde baby hair swept across his face, little fist clutching at the neck of her sweater — but she’s a little preoccupied trying to organise the last coaching session of the day. 

Perhaps if she’d noticed, it wouldn’t have taken her two more months to finally pluck up the courage to talk to him about it.)

As it is, a lot of important things happen before Tessa starts the conversation she’s been trying to have since January.

Natalie and Gabriel win their expected second World title, in the least dramatic competition that Tessa has attended all season long. 

Niamh and Joe land just outside the top ten at Junior Worlds, a good few spots above the target their federation set for them, and Niamh subsequently dyes her hair bright blue in celebration. 

Reece and Nolan outdo themselves, besting the Canadian silver medalists to finish second of the national team with a ninth place finish overall.

It’s a dream of a Junior _and_ Senior World Championships, and Tessa feels like she hardly deserves the week off she and Scott give themselves afterwards, but they’ve mandated a two week break for all their skaters, so she’d only be sitting around the house twiddling her thumbs if she didn’t take some proper vacation time too. Not thinking about it too much, they decide on a quick five day vacation at a beachfront hotel in Cuba. It’s supposed to be warm, sunny, and free from the worry of competition now that the season has concluded, which for Tessa is quickly replaced by the worry of how to work up to the conversation she needs to have with Scott.

She wonders whether it’s the kind of thing to throw at him over breakfast, lightly, like it’s something that just popped into her head five seconds ago. Maybe she should bring it up when they’re strolling along the beach, arms brushing against one another — oh, you know the dog I said we didn’t have time to adopt last year? How would you feel about a human child instead? It’s probably too on the nose to mention it when they pass the family building a sandcastle on the beachfront, with the one snotty-nosed toddler trying to feed himself a fistful of sand.

In the end, none of her careful scene setting matters. She can’t say it anywhere but the privacy of their room, late on the first afternoon after they’ve spent the morning sunning by the pool. Earlier, she had attempted to make headway in the pile of fourteen books she brought with her, and only succeeded in re-reading the same ten pages over and over as she deliberated how best to approach the conversation.

Now they’re both warm and heavy from the sun, and they lay quietly on the bed together for a few minutes, before she takes Scott’s hand and eases it below the waistband of her cotton shorts.

Which is always her preferred approach.

He fucks her, maddeningly slow and sweet, into the thin white sheets of their hotel bed, tanned forearms holding his weight and his whole body pressing down atop her, doesn’t let up until the wave of her second orgasm comes rolling straight through the first, his teeth breaking skin at her neck as he spills inside her.

After, he stays on top of her, breathing softly as she combs her fingers through his hair. The blazing heat of the midday sun has faded into something sweeter, and there’s a gentle breeze that carries off the ocean and through the half-open balcony doors, lifting the damp heat from their skin. It carries with it the scent of the waves: raw and brisk and slightly briny, sun-soaked and salt-spattered. She imagines that she can taste it there on his skin when she presses up to kiss whatever part of him she can reach: chest, neck, the angular plane of his shoulder.

He’s still inside her — she can feel him, heavy and soft, spent but still thick enough to fill her out pleasantly — and he makes a quiet noise when she shifts her hips, bringing her legs up to wrap around him.

“Slowly,” he mutters, dipping his head to mouth at the underside of her ribcage, scattering along the valley of her breasts.

She’s not doing anything, not really.

She just likes this: feeling as close as humanly possible to him, the warmth of his skin pressed against every inch of hers. The moments after are almost better than the actual sex. They’re both warm and languid, no purpose to any movement apart from a gentle awareness of one another, re-exploring what has been mapped a thousand times over.

She likes the way he splays his hand across the side of her neck, tipping her chin gently upwards so he can leave wet red marks all along her throat. They’ll be there tomorrow, fading blossoms against pale white canvas, and she’ll like that too, being able to run her fingers across her skin and feel his kiss bitten into her. Being with Scott is all-encompassing, leaves no room for her to get tied up in her own head, to second-guess the things she should or shouldn’t say.

At least, it does usually.

The reminder of what she’s been putting off for months is impossible to ignore; it’s gathered to tug at the back of her brain, pricking at her closed eyelids, tells her to stop being such a damn coward and say it. Now she has no excuses, no distractions of competition or work. Now it’s just the two of them, and he’s kissing her, deep and slow, his hips pressing shallowly into her — but she’s still and rigid underneath him despite her best efforts to stay in the moment.

He stops immediately. 

“Tess?”

If it was anybody else, she’d try and tell them to keep going, push past her brief discomfort. She figures she’d have a better time trying to get Scott to throw his entire collection of signed Leafs merch off a cliff.

“Sorry, I — sorry—” she mumbles, and she _must_ be a little deranged, because there’s a slight waver of laughter in her voice.

“Tess? Hey, what is it? What’s wrong?”

She makes a noise that comes out somewhere between a sigh and a sob, rolling over onto her side so she can’t look him in the eyes, which always seems to make things a hundred times better and worse all at once.

The problem is that she wants his fucking kids, which has never ever been a problem for her before she _made_ it one.

The problem is that she’s doing such a grand job of self-sabotaging that she’s put off saying for months and months what they joked about over a year ago, what his own mother teased them about when they told her they were moving in together.

The problem is that she hasn’t just come out and said, once and for all, that—

“I think I want to have a baby with you,” she says, only it comes out in a gasp of exhaled breath so fast that all the syllables run together into one jumbled tangle of _ithinkiwanttohaveababywithyou_. 

Scott blinks. “Uh—”

“I think—”

She doesn’t think. 

She knows, the certainty hitting her squarely in the chest.

She wants his child. She wants _their_ child, wants the family she’d never considered before now. Before him.

“I want to have a baby with you,” she says, and for the first time in her life, the words come out exactly the way she imagined: firm and clear, without even a twinge of hesitation. 

A small burst of pride blooms low in her belly, which just about manages to outweigh the rush of sheer terror as soon as the words leave her lips — proper words, distinct and unmistakable. There’s no taking back what she’s just told him, and _fuck_ , she hopes she hasn’t just messed everything up, because it’s more than them on the line now, it’s an entire skating school that depends on them being able to get their shit together and have a functional relationship.

She scrambles up to a kneeling position, scraping her hair back behind her ear.

“But I mean, um, it’s negotiable, obviously, and I don’t really need you to _do_ anything about it, I just — it’s been on my mind a lot recently and I felt like I should say it just in case I hadn’t been clear about it previously. Well, I know I haven’t, or I’ve been clear one way, but things have obviously changed a lot since then, and I don’t know whether you’d remember that, or whether—”

Scott doesn’t often interrupt her, but God, Tessa’s glad he does this time.

“Tess, T, _Tessa_. Stop,” he says, sitting up and placing his hands either side of her face to gently squash her cheeks together and get her to stop talking. “Jesus. Are you kidding me? Of _course_ I want a kid with you.”

Tessa stares back at him, her eyes very wide.

“Oh.”

Her chest warms at the look on his face: a little incredulous, his eyebrows pulled together in that way he always does when she’s done something unintentionally endearing, the corner of his mouth pulling up in a bemused smile.

It’s a good look.

“You… knew that, right?” he says slowly, one eyebrow raising.

“How was I supposed to know if you never told me?”

“I’m pretty sure _you_ were the one who said I was gonna pop out six kids the moment we retired from competition.”

“Well, obviously, I knew it was something you _wanted_. But you never said anything serious about it, and you even stopped joking about it the way you used to. I thought maybe you’d decided it was a terrible idea, or your brothers had told you the truth about looking after a tiny poop machine on legs. I don’t know. I don’t know! Maybe you just didn’t want kids with me.”

It sounds so stupid to her now she’s voicing the thought out loud, and she can feel her cheeks flush, even as her voice catches a little on the words she’s struggled with for so long.

“I just mean… we’ve never had anything simple like that. It’s always been climbing mountains to meet each other halfway and… and work, _hard_ work, and two decades of relationship coaching. I knew you wanted kids, of _course_ I did. But maybe that was too normal, maybe you wouldn’t — maybe you wouldn’t want that with me.”

Her hands are trembling in her lap as she looks down. She can’t tell whether she’s shaking with nerves or the rush of relief, but Scott’s hands wrap around her own regardless, thumbs splaying across her wrists like he would hold all of her in his palms if he could reach far enough.

In the warm security of his hands, she feels the rejection of every fear she could ever confess to him, and when she looks up again, it’s there in his eyes too. 

“Nothing, Tess,” he says, slowly. “There is literally _nothing_ in the world that I don’t want with you. We could have a hundred years and I’d still be grasping at fucking straws by the end of it, begging for another minute.”

“That’s a little dramatic,” she says, but it’s under her breath, and she’s smiling before he even pokes her gently in the ribs.

“And in this hundred year scenario, sure, it’d be pretty damn incredible to have a kid. But I always thought that was never your thing, and I was totally fine with that. We can be happy whatever way. I’d get all the fun time with Danny and Charlie’s kids, without the grey hair of having my own. I was more than up for that. Still am.”

“I never thought it would be my thing either, but…”

He looks at her quietly, his thumbs rubbing across the underside of her wrists, where the veins weave and splay like a route map at her pulse. “What made you change your mind?” he says.

She wishes she could figure that out herself.

She’s tried to narrow it down a hundred times over the past few months, to pin-point the exact moment when something in the back of her brain clicked into a different gear. The best she can come up with is that it’s an accumulation of so many small moments that she can barely put a name to them all: only knows that she’s wanted things with him that she’s never wanted before, just like she’s felt things with him that she’d never even realised were things she was capable of reaching within herself. 

It’s the new surety of herself now, the kind of personhood that won’t be engulfed by someone else’s identity — mentor, lover, mother — the knowledge that she can wear all those labels and still come out herself at the end of it. 

And, above all, it’s him.

That part has never been hard for Tessa to figure out. She could only want this with him. It’s his face she can imagine, reading their child to sleep at the end of the day, flying around the rink with their child clutched so securely in his arms that he would sooner hit the ice himself before they fell an inch, his laughter and his beaming, proud-as-punch smile with every step and every word and every year. 

Perhaps she’s wanted this all along, all those years she was listening to boyfriends mutter in her ear about a hypothetical future that she never entertained with them, that she assumed she would never entertain with anyone. 

She was missing a partner.

So as Scott waits for her to collect her thoughts, she can only give him a bemused smile, shaking her head. “Nothing,” she says. “Everything. You. Your niece, actually, Alyssa. She helped too.”

He raises her eyebrows at her. “Alyssa? That didn’t put you off having kids for the next twenty years? Or ever?”

“Stop it,” she exhales, and he gives her an unashamed grin. “Our kid could be so much worse, you know. It’s really just luck of the draw. They could get my uncontrollable laughter and your impulsivity, and my stubbornness and your sense of humour, and then we would really be in trouble.”

“I am offended by every single one of those accusations. But I would love them just the same even if they _were_ lucky enough to tick all those boxes.”

“ _Even_ if they inherited my squinty left eye?”

“Mh-hmm.”

“Your tone deafness?”

“I’d finally have someone to appreciate my alternative pitch.”

“My lack of hair until I was two years old?”

“I’ve always thought that was kinda cute,” he grins, tickling her wrist when she makes a face at him. “But _yes_. In answer to your question, my love is unconditional and unending.” 

“Of course, living in Montreal, you know they’re going to grow up supporting the Canadiens…”

Scott’s face darkens. 

“I’m just telling you now so you can prepare yourself for the slow and inevitable betrayal—”

“Over. My. Dead. _Body._ ”

“That doesn’t sound very much like unconditional and unending love to me.”

“Oh my god. Tessa, we have to move back to Ontario. I’m serious. This is a disaster.”

“It’s good to know that hockey is the dealbreaker for you as a father. Stop — Scott, _stop_ freaking out. Listen, we’ll just put a little blue maple leaf hat on the ultrasound, and you can sing the Canadian national anthem to my stomach every night, and we can ask Babsy to be the godfather. I’m sure that will do the trick.”

“...Can we?”

“...”

“Tess — no, I’m _joking_ , don’t leave the bed, _Tess—_ ”  
  


* * *

  
She’s pretty sure she got her point across, but she still feels like she needs to clarify the next morning, as they’re passing through the hotel grounds to get to the beach. 

It’s another scorching day, and Scott has taken full advantage of the opportunity to go shirtless, donning a pair of neon green boardshorts which she almost ripped off him (and not in a good way) the first time he came onto the balcony to present them to her. Tessa is keeping it tasteful for the both of them in a matching cobalt blue and magenta bikini, softened slightly by the sheer cover-up she’s thrown on over it. Cut high at the hip and snug at the chest, the bikini is an excellent fit on her, highlighting the assets that have developed over her years of retirement. She’d felt good just standing there in the bedroom with it on, even better at the look on Scott’s face when he saw her.

(They were half an hour later to breakfast than usual, but she figures the brief diversion was worth the slightly stale croissants.)

Now, they have nothing but a blissfully empty day in front of them, and a few things that Tessa is keen to go over from the afternoon before. Just in case. And also because there are a few more important conversations to have before she feels quite ready to spring new life forth amidst an Olympic quadrennial.

“I mean, I’m not saying like right now, let’s just make a baby tonight,” she says, under her breath, and Scott almost falls into the pool. “I’m just saying at some point.” 

Scott’s eyes are very wide as he turns to her, coughing slightly. “No, uh — yeah, I got that, T. Yep.”

“Sooner rather than later. I can stay on the pill until we’re absolutely certain.”

“Sure.”

“Because it’ll be harder the longer we leave it, and practically speaking, if we’re going to try for anything we’d want to start well before the Grand Prix. We’re both away so much that it would be difficult to keep to a routine. It’s supposed to be best to try once every two to three days. Or some people say to time it around ovulation, but that’s tricky to work out, so I feel like it’s better to be safe than sorry.”

“You’ve, uh… you’ve really thought about this, huh?”

She tilts her head up to raise her eyebrows at him, and he gives a snort of laughter.

“Yeah, yeah, stupid question. So is this the point where you tell me that you’ve been secretly turning the upstairs office into a nursery?”

Tessa grins. “I would never do such a thing behind your back. But now that I’ve got your _permission_ …”

His hands slip around her hips as they near their destination: two sun loungers shaded by a rattan canopy with billowing white fabric drapes providing a modicum of privacy.

“By all means,” he says, leaning down to press his lips against the shell of her ear, fingers digging in slightly just above the line of her bikini. “Don’t let me stop you from enjoying yourself.”

She shivers a little, darting a quick glance around them and noting the relative emptiness of the beach on this side of the hotel, an expanse of white sand stretching out before them.

It’s quiet enough for her liking; but she still only lets him kiss her once, his hands coming greedily up to settle across the flat of her stomach, before she tugs him into the canopy and makes sure the drapes are tied down tight.  
  


* * *

  
If their hypothetical future child ever asks them where the glorious moment of conception occurred, Tessa is probably not going to tell them as a matter of principle.

She’s _definitely_ not going to tell them that it happened on a beach in Cuba with a smattering of unsuspecting sunbathers mere metres away from a canopy lounger that went suspiciously quiet as soon as hands were put to skin in the name of Factor 50 suncream.

But it almost did.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Love and thanks to the usuals for their beta-reading and support throughout. Please let me know what you thought in the comments below -- anything you liked, things you want to see more of, any of it! We've got another four years to go yet, and I can't wait to write them all.


End file.
